If we as Catholics are not evangelizing, we are not obeying Christ. We are a Church of missionaries.
There has been a excellent discussion on Protestantism and Catholics in the past, and I want to refer to this, as my next few posts will be on how to discuss salvation with Protestants.
America was a Catholic nation and now it is secular. But, there are many good Protestants who would benefit from some good catechesis and mission work. So many liberal Catholics see this as politically incorrect.
It is not. This idea rests on charity.
But, as usual, are similarities bring us together at base. We all love Christ and have him as the center of our lives. We believe in the salvific act on Golgotha, allow with a different interpretation.
I want to share this man's review of Louis Boyer on Protestants and us to start the discussion here. This is from Why Catholicism Makes Protestantism Tick: Louis Bouyer on the Reformation | Mark Brumley
I hope you can read the typeface, as I am having trouble with the blog set-up today.
In other words, we all need grace to reach heaven and cooperate with God's mercy.
Bouyer quotes, at length, from the Second Council of Orange (529), the teaching of which was confirmed by Pope Boniface II as de fide or part of the Church's faith. The Council asserted that salvation is the work of God's grace and that even the beginning of faith or the consent to saving grace is itself the result of grace. By our natural powers, we can neither think as we ought nor choose any good pertaining to salvation. We can only do so by the illumination and impulse of the Holy Spirit.
Nor is it merely that man is limited in doing good. The Council affirmed that, as a result of the Fall, man is inclined to will evil. His freedom is gravely impaired and can only be repaired by God's grace. Following a number of biblical quotations, the Council states, "[W]e are obliged, in the mercy of God, to preach and believe that, through sin of the first man, the free will is so weakened and warped, that no one thereafter can either love God as he ought, or believe in God, or do good for the sake of God, unless moved, previously, by the grace of the divine mercy . . . . Our salvation requires that we assert and believe that, in every good work we do, it is not we who have the initiative, aided, subsequently, by the mercy of God, but that he begins by inspiring faith and love towards him, without any prior merit of ours."
The Council of Trent, writes Bouyer, repeated that teaching, ruling out "a parallel action on the part of God and man, a sort of ‘synergism', where man contributes, in the work of salvation, something, however slight, independent of grace." Even where Trent insists that man is not saved passively, notes Bouyer, it doesn't assert some independent, human contribution to salvation. Man freely cooperates in salvation, but his free cooperation is itself the result of grace. Precisely how this is so is mysterious, and the Church has not settled on a particular theological explanation. But that it is so, insist Bouyer, is Catholic teaching. Thus, concludes Bouyer, "the Catholic not only may, but must in virtue of his own faith, give a full and unreserved adherence to thesola gratia, understood in the positive sense we have seen upheld by Protestants
To be continued--how do we get grace?
