Your points about being careful not to lead others into error are well taken. In the spirit of faith seeking understanding, I will look for confirmation of my previous statements from authoritative, orthodox moral theologians and official church teaching.
That being said, I think you may have read certain attitudes into what I have written that I don’t think are justified by the words I used. The basic points I was trying to make are doctrinally sound and are basic tenets of our faith as Christians. They are:
- God loves us and when he judges us he will be both just and merciful.
- God is trying to bring us to heaven, not to send us to hell.
- The only people who go to hell are those who choose to, whether by a positive choice or by neglect. That is what is meant by the three criteria for a mortal sin, “serious matter, full knowledge and full consent.”
- All sinners, even those who have not had the opportunity to receive absolution from a priest, have the duty to hope in God’s mercy. And if they have a duty to hope in God’s mercy, it is because he has promised his mercy to those who ask for it. The usual way to ask for God’s mercy is the sacrament of Confession.
By revealing himself as our Father, God is telling us a lot about himself. He is instructing us to trust in him as a child trusts in his father. By revealing himself as “father,” God is actually commanding us to use our human knowledge of how a just, loving, and merciful father treats his children as the basis of our trust in him.
So how does a child trust such a father? He knows that his father will forgive him if he expresses his sincere sorrow for his transgressions, promises to do his best to avoid the same offense in the future, and tries his best to do what his father expects, even if,
through no fault of his own, he is unable to perfectly fulfill his father’s wishes as the child understands them to be.
I think (my opinion) that any reasonable interpretation of the Church’s teaching about God’s fatherhood, his love, his justice, and his mercy, necessarily leads to the conclusion that a person who dies in a car crash on his way to confess a mortal sin receives God’s mercy, and that a person who unknowingly receives an “invalid” absolution from a priest is, in fact, forgiven.
If this were not the case, then every time we confess a mortal sin we would have to ask the priest to prove he has valid faculties to hear our confession in order to be sure our mortal sins are forgiven. We would have to have before us during every confession the exact words of absolution so that we could compare the priest’s words with the words on the card. We would have to ask the priest to repeat the absolution if we weren’t absolutely sure he said every syllable. And even if we were absolutely sure the priest had valid faculties to hear our confession, and that he pronounced the words absolutely perfectly, we could simply be mistaken. This means that even if we do everything required of us, to the best of our ability, we could not be confident that our mortal sins were forgiven. This is not reasonable. It is scrupulous. It is a practical denial of God’s love and mercy. It reduces God to a technician, rather than a lover. It is bad theology.
The Church can’t and doesn’t attempt to explicitly define what occurs in every possible circumstance. Rather, she defines doctrines and proposes principles to apply those doctrines to the circumstances at hand, and then expects us, as rational adults, to make a judgment. That is what I have done, and I believe the judgment I made is based on sound doctrine, sound moral and pastoral theology, and sound reason.
BTW, I notice that your forum name is “nobeerinheaven,” and that my signature is “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” I wonder what that means…
