Difficulty with one of The Church's Teachings

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BornInMarch said:
Everyone else, I would like to thank you all for being helpful and understanding. You’ve all made me feel better about things, for which I am immensely thankful.

PolarGuy, your reply stood out to me most. Very well said.
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This is for you BornInMarch.

The Lord bless you and keep you:
The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you:
The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace. (Numbers 6:24-2)

pax
 
In_His_Grace said:
This is for you BornInMarch.

The Lord bless you and keep you:
The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you:
The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace. (Numbers 6:24-2)

pax
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Thank you.
 
BornInMarch said:
I am a Catholic; I was baptized, I go to Church, I pray to God, I try to do right by others, and I believe that The Papacy was created by Jesus when he handed Saint Peter the keys to Heaven and Earth.

However, I disagree with some of The Church’s Teachings (specifically, the idea that Good People go to Hell).

According to Church Doctrine, anyone who dies with an confessed mortal sin is automatically going to go to Hell.
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This reminds me of what Fulton Sheen said, "There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.”

You don’t disagree with Church teaching, because that’s not Church teaching. There is no “automatically” with God. He is the God of justice, but more importantly He is the God of Love and mercy. “Mercy triumphs over judgement” James 2:13.

God doesn’t condemn anybody to hell. God allows us to have free will. If we steadfastly reject Him, He gives us our desire - to be apart from Him for eternity. The image of God you are presenting is like the Puritans- a God who could hardly wait to damn you to Hell for the slightest slip up. That’s not who God is, and it’s not what the Church teaches.
 
Yes, this is a hard teaching. We should begin with the Lord’s words in the Gospel on the topic. They are numerous. Then we look to the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. Then we look at the Councils and Catechisms of the Church. We can’t do all that here.

A few brief comments on the issue will have to suffice.
  1. God loves the damned. In fact, God loves everyone much more than us, including Uncle Hank who never went to Mass. He also knows him much better than us. He is perfectly just and perfectly merciful and perfectly wise. We aren’t and should be fine with all of God’s decisions (about this and about anything, really). God does what is right.
  2. The road to salvation is narrow. It involves very real commitments and crosses. The Gospel is good news, but it is very serious news too.
  3. The basic doctrine of salvation is this… We get what we want when we die. God, or not God. That’s fair. What was the final goal of my life? This is normally revealed by our actions, in relation to what God has revealed to us. Read the Catechism on charity.
  4. Hell is not the same for everyone, just like Heaven isn’t. It is in proportion to one’s demerits. The ancient idea of Limbo is relevant here… The top circle of Hell is actually not that awful, minus the lack of the vision of God.
  5. Being a good person, through and through, is actually really, really hard. Natural virtues, like patience or humility or prudence, are HAAARD… We are not as nice as we think we are. We need grace, the Church, a Savior to trust in to help us… And it’s urgent! That’s His message in the Gospel, at least.
 
To the OP:

If you come on here and say this sort of thing, there are going to be plenty of trads who will jump on you. They are certainly fond of the idea that very very few are saved, and they are also very dismissive about the idea that under certain conditions, damnation can seem pretty arbitrary if you take a very legalistic interpretation of Church teachings. For example, the type of person who will say, if you died in a car accident on the way to confession, you’re probably in hell because you wouldn’t have had the chance to make a perfect act of contrition—there are plenty of guys like that here. So this probably isn’t the best place to go—but then again, there really isn’t a place on the internet where Catholics gather that radical traditionalists haven’t infiltrated.

Now, I think the rule is something more like, if you don’t die in a state of grace, you go to hell, rather than having even one unconfessed mortal sin. God can do as He pleases, so to me, I would rather like to believe that a good person like the one on the road to confession would have been given some kind of help to get into a state of grace. My mom actually died rather suddenly and in her sleep, so this is a matter close to my heart.

Now, the truth is, what I’d really like to say is, if the trads are right and those people are really in Hell, God was a Demiurge all along rather than a God of love, so there was no real hope to begin with, but that might be going a bit too far. Nevertheless, I think it is consistent with the sort of things Jesus said in his ministry to hope that the ultra-legalistic interpretation of radical traditionalists that, like you said, someone who dies suddenly even when they were trying to receive confession is certainly damned is not accurate.
 
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