Are Catholics 'saved': part 1

As I posted yesterday, I am in an ongoing discussion with a man who has questioned whether Catholics are 'saved' due to the vast differences in our beliefs and the beliefs of his denomination. I will be referring to this person as Joe throughout these blogs and I will be referring to his denomination simply as the Saved Church. Comments that Joe made that are direct quotes from him will be in "quotation marks." They will also be italicized and in bold. At other times, I am going to paraphrase what was said since I did not write down his exact words for everything. I will include any clarifications I need to add for my readers by highlighting them in yellow. Our first conversation was a few days ago and started like this:

 Joe: I wanted to visit with you today and probably a few more times over the next month to ask some questions about the Catholic Church. I have alot of questions about your faith, my faith and the differences between the two. I attend 'Saved Church' and in a conversation with our pastor about two weeks ago someone said it was sad that Catholics "aren't saved." I asked our pastor if that was true and he said, "Unfortunately it is true. Catholics just don't understand that you have to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior. Because they won't do this they are not saved and will be damned to hell."

Fr. Chris: Do you believe that?

 
Joe: I don't know. My pastor said that Catholic don't think that accepting Jesus as Savior is enough. He said, "Catholic might think they believe in Jesus as their savior but they don't really think that or they wouldn't do all these other things to 'save their soul' like go to confession. They think they can do these other things and earn their salvation."

I guess my first question is, "Isn't that what Catholics believe? Don't you believe that you have to go to confession and do all these other things or you won't be saved? But doesn't the bible say that we only have to believe in Jesus and we are saved? That's what Jesus told Nicodemus (referring to John 3:18 which says, "He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed.") He continued, "Proclaiming Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior guarantees me my salvation."

That is the foundation to our conversation. Even though this is just the start, I wanted to stop here as we begin getting into the heart of our first discussion next. We continued discussing and exploring his understandings of the Church for almost two hours and most of our topics originated from these statements above. I will post the first 10 or 15 minutes of that conversation in the next couple of days. Again, both he and I welcome your comments and insights to our discussion. Until next time…God bless.

posted by: crossman at 06:29 | link | comments (2) |

Comments:

#1  08 October 2007 - 15:17

 

Father Chris,

I am a convert and growing up my faith was not so fire and brimstone towards Catholics.

I do beleive that all followers of Christ, whether Catholic or not are saved by virtue of believing in what Christ did for us.

I do beleive that the pastor needs to talk to you about Catholics. He needs to be educated about what Catholics believe and why we celebrate the sacrements.

Your friend, justs wants to understand Catholics. It took me more than a year after my conversion to barely know the basics. After 13 years, I'm still learning and growing in my Catholic faith.

What a great blog!

Julie

Anonymous

#2  10 October 2007 - 14:30

 

I agree with the above comment. Like Julie, I am still growing my faith and I believe that we can all be saved.

mgrhetos2

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