Answering 5 Myths About the Catholic Church and Salvation

Recently I was asked by a staff member at a Peru, Indiana parish to make something to help rebut the preaching of a local pastor.  He'd been preaching about the Catholic Church's erroneous teaching on the subject of salvation - and apparently urging his congregants to bother their Catholic friends about it. 

So after some brainstorming, I came up with a simple trifold brochure which answers five of the common myths which are spread about the Church's teaching on salvation.  Enjoy!

 
Link for the PDF [HERE]

1) The Catholic Church does not teach that salvation is a free gift of God, but that it must be earned through our merits and good behavior.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we read the following:

“Since the initiative belongs to God in the order of grace, no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification, at the beginning of conversion.” [2010] 

“Justification has been merited for us by the Passion of Christ who offered himself on the cross as a living victim, holy and pleasing to God, and whose blood has become the instrument of atonement for the sins of all men. Justification is conferred in Baptism, the sacrament of faith.” [2020]

In the late 1500’s, the Church held a council called The Council of Trent.  In its sixth session it dealt with the subject of salvation.  It condemned the idea that salvation could be earned, saying:

“If anyone says that man may be justified before God by his own works, whether done through the teaching of human nature, or that of the law, without the grace of God through Jesus Christ, let him be anathema.” [Session 6, Canon 1]

So what the Church teaches is that justification and salvation is a gift God freely gives to sinners.  The means by which Jesus ordinarily gives us this gift to an individual is when the Church baptizes him/her.  Just as a gardener uses a watering can to give life to flowers, Christ uses the sacrament of Baptism to give eternal life to humans.  As it says in 1Peter 3:21, “Baptism now saves you.”


2) The Catholic faith rejects justification by faith alone and instead says we're justified by "faith plus works".

It is often said that the Catholic Church rejects the idea of justification by “faith alone”.  In the same council mentioned above, the Church said:

“If anyone says that sinners are justified by ‘faith alone’, meaning that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to obtain the grace of justification - and it isn’t in any way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of one’s own will, let him be anathema.” [Session 6, Canon 9]

To understand this, imagine a man who believes that Jesus is the savior and trusts that Jesus will forgive all his sins.  And because he’s so confident that Jesus freely forgives his sins, he sees no reason to repent of his sins.  He is unfaithful to his wife, he steals from his employees, and he neglects his children – all the while thinking his destination is secured by his trust in Jesus.  What a surprise he’ll receive on judgement day!

That’s what the Council of Trent is condemning.  If by “faith alone” one means that the orientation of a person’s will is irrelevant - that a person can be totally unrepentant and still be saved - then that cannot be a true description of saving faith. 

However, if one understands a saving faith to include one’s turning toward God in love, then that’s entirely different.  That would be the “faith working through love” mentioned by Paul in Galatians 5:6. That sort of faith is sufficient on its own to save us.

As Pope Benedict XVI said in 2008: “Luther’s phrase ‘faith alone’ is true, if it is not opposed to faith in charity, in love. Faith is looking at Christ, entrusting oneself to Christ, being united to Christ, conformed to Christ, to His life. And the form, the life of Christ, is love.”

As for being justified by “faith plus works”, the Church never uses that language to describe justification.


3) The Catholic faith sees no distinction between justification and sanctification.

In non-Catholic Christian circles they speak of “justification” – when our sins are forgiven and we’re brought into a right relationship with God – and “sanctification” – when God purifies our hearts through the Holy Spirit.  A huge emphasis is placed on keeping those two concepts separate, as if one is an apple and the other an orange. 

We Catholics do have these concepts, but we imagine them in a different way. Rather than thinking of justification and sanctification as two totally different things, we imagine them as different phases of spiritual life.  Justification is like conception, the first moment of life.  Sanctification is like the growth and development of that life.

That start of spiritual life – justification – occurs in Baptism.  The Catechism says:

“The Most Holy Trinity gives the baptized sanctifying grace, the grace of justification.” [1266]  

Our sanctification, which the Church sometimes calls an “increase of justification”, is described by the Council of Trent like this:

“Having therefore been justified, and made the friends and family of God, they are renewed, as the Apostle says, ‘day by day’ - advancing from virtue to virtue. This increase of justification the holy Church begs [from God], when she prays, ‘Give unto us, O Lord, increase of faith, hope, and charity.’"[Session 6, Chapter 10]

So, contrary to this myth, there is a distinction between justification and sanctification.  It’s just that we have a different concept of how the two are related in the spiritual life.


 4) The Catholic Church says you can't have any certainty about your salvation.

Many non-Catholics place a high value on having complete certainty of going to Heaven at the end of life.  This is a level of certainty which the Church says we shouldn’t claim to have.  The Council of Trent said:

“If anyone says that he will for certain, with absolute and infallible certainty, have the gift of perseverance unto the end, let him be anathema.” [Session 6, Canon 16]

During the Christian life we encounter people who may have been committed disciples at one point, but then fall away.  They are (to use Jesus’ parable of the seeds) those who “believe for a time” and are then drawn away.  But if you were to rewind back to when they were active in the faith, they may never have dreamed that they’d one day leave.

If we reflect on that, we recognize the possibility that we could end up the same way.  While we can have confidence in the present moment about our salvation, the Church warns us not to be presumptive about the future.  We must continue praying that God will preserve us until death.

Even the non-Catholics who claim to have total certainty about their final destination have to confront this problem.  They’ll admit there are people who think they have true faith but later fall away.  They’ll say those people were fooling themselves. 

But then… how does anyone know he isn’t fooling himself?  How do I know I’m not among the people who only thinks he has true faith?  If a non-Catholic is willing to honestly think through that question, he’ll realize he also has to deal with uncertainty.


5) The Catholic faith holds that Jesus suffering wasn't sufficient, and humans have to do their part by suffering in Purgatory.

To the contrary, the Church teaches that the grace merited by Jesus Christ is the source of everything in the Christian life.  Whether it’s our justification or sanctification, all of it is a work of grace.  The Catechism says: 

“The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of His own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it. [] It is in us the source of the work of sanctification.” [1999]

All Christians agree on two things: 1) Sanctification can be a difficult journey filled with suffering and 2) this fact does not challenge the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice.  Rather, our endurance of trials is a work of God’s grace.  As the letter to the Hebrews says: 

“For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” 
- Heb. 12:11

Most of us will die before being completely sanctified.  We’ll still have sinful tendencies and desires left unresolved when we pass on.  Therefore, the Church teaches there must be a final process of sanctification before entering into the full glory of Heaven.  The Catechism states:

“All who die in God's friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are assured of their eternal salvation. But after death they undergo purification to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.  The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification.”  [1030-1031]

Again, this doesn’t deny the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice.  It’s just that Catholics have wondered what happens if the journey of sanctification isn’t completed by the time we die… and we arrived at an answer.