Few will make it to Heaven?

[Tom_Baum]

Universal salvation is a heresy. While we certainly would hope for it, it won’t happen.

If you have ever been to Mass, one of the Eucharistic prayers, I think it is, said by the priest very specifically asks God to “have Mercy on us ALL”.

Do you also consider “Universal Mercy” a heresy?

The Catholic Church sure doesn’t.

You wrote, “Universal salvation is a heresy. While we certainly would hope for it, it won’t happen.”

May I ask why you “certainly would hope for” “a heresy”?

 

[IdiNaPut]

Nobody knows the mind of God. We can all guess this and guess that. God can do ANYTHING! So, even a serial mass murderer can make it to heaven if God allows it! God is mercy, this i believe. Ask and it shall be given.

God knows us all individually. He knows our weaknesses. He knows who we are and what we are. I pray that God will Excellent pistforgive me for my sins. That he will shine his mercy on me at the time of death. This i ask of all humanity!

God bless you all

Excellent post. The best we can all do is hope for God’s mercy.

 

[BobCatholic]

I’m going to repeat myself.

"I’m still disagreeing with this. Our bulletproof vest is the infinite and unconditional Love and Mercy of the God who created us.

God’s Mercy is not broken by one mortal sin. He loves even those in a state of mortal sin. What is fragile is our love of Him. The sacrament of penance is not a way to get God to love us again. It’s an opportunity to show that we take responsibility for our own fallibility and want to love Him back again."

Remember that God also loves those in hell. It doesn’t help them.

God’s grace is not as fragile as you seem to think.

One mortal sin and its broken.

But there is plenty of glass shields to replace it, so while it is plentiful, it is fragile.

I’m honestly worried that you might be scrupulous.

I worry about that too. Then I worry that I’m not scrupulous enough. Matthew 25 is scary! Sins of omission are deadly.

 

[BobCatholic]

No we wouldn’t, and as Catholics we don’t. God’s mercy is infinite. The only way we can not receive it is if we don’t ask for it at all. We should never give in to the idea that we are beyond saving.

God’s mercy is infinite. But we are given forgiveness and grace whenever we ask. OK. So I leave the confessional with the glass jacket. And bullets flying all over the place.

But someone who wants to love God and wants the grace to be with Him for eternity and asks that of Him will not be denied.

What about the sins of omission? Matthew 25 is scary.

It’s not that mortal sin breaks God’s grace.

No, it breaks God’s grace that is inside me. It doesn’t break the rest of God’s grace, which is infinite.

Mortal sin is a conscious choice to oppose God, just as doing a good deed is a conscious choice to act in accordance with His will.

and sins of omission are deadly.

willingly telling God that we do not want Him,

I want God, I don’t know if he wants me.

I feel like I don’t have a personal relationship with God. Prayer is a monologue. He won’t talk to me. When a woman is giving you the silent treatment, she’s angry at you, and you’re in trouble. When God gives one the silent treatment…oh oh…

 

[BobCatholic]

Seems to me that from what I have heard and read, that God has also willed it for “everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth”.

But not everyone is saved. God’s will isn’t being done.

And also that it was God “who gave himself as ransom for all”.

Are you saying that God’s ransom is not enough for God’s Will to come to Fruition?

Take notice that people go to hell and God’s will for them to be saved did not come to fruition.

Are you also saying that satan’s purpose in God’s creation is to thwart God’s Will?

Are you saying the devil doesn’t want to thwart God’s will?

Every person that goes to hell is satan successfully thwarting God’s will.

 

[ready]

Dear Theoda,

I haven’t been reading all of your posts, but I commend you for all the time and effort you have put into defending the teaching of the Saints who taught the fewness of the saved. I give you a great deal of credit for all the charity and patience you have shown towards the CAF members who do not believe the many Saints who have taught the fewness of the saved. You are gaining great merit for Heaven! God bless you!

Yours in Mary Immaculate, our Mother and Queen,
ready

P.S. I know of NO canonized Saint–not even a single one of them–who have taught that many or most souls get saved, and I know of many canonized Saints who have taught that few souls are saved. I am with these Saints and with you, Theoda, who are with them. We will work extra hard at salvation and will pray extra hard for our family, friends and associates because we know that getting into Heaven is not as common as some people seem to think it is.

 

[ajecphotos]

At the moment i am definitely heading downwards!!!

 

[theoda]

I am wondering is, “Alas! The greater number of Catholics, the greater number of those who live here, perhaps even those who are in this assembly, will be damned!”, part of the “excerpt from the sermon by St. Leonard of Port Maurice”?

Do you know if he thought that ALL of those not Catholic were “damned”?

Of course he did. He believed in the infallible doctrine that there is no salvation outside the church.

People with invisible ignorance are baptized by their desire and are in the church and are thus in a way Catholic.

 

[theoda]

Dear Theoda,

I haven’t been reading all of your posts, but I commend you for all the time and effort you have put into defending the teaching of the Saints who taught the fewness of the saved. I give you a great deal of credit for all the charity and patience you have shown towards the CAF members who do not believe the many Saints who have taught the fewness of the saved. You are gaining great merit for Heaven! God bless you!

Yours in Mary Immaculate, our Mother and Queen,
ready

P.S. I know of NO canonized Saint–not even a single one of them–who have taught that many or most souls get saved, and I know of many canonized Saints who have taught that few souls are saved. I am with these Saints and with you, Theoda, who are with them. We will work extra hard at salvation and will pray extra hard for our family, friends and associates because we know that getting into Heaven is not as common as some people seem to think it is.

Thank you ready. Thank you for also defending the teachings of the saints and God bless you too!

 

[theoda]

If you have ever been to Mass, one of the Eucharistic prayers, I think it is, said by the priest very specifically asks God to “have Mercy on us ALL”.

Do you also consider “Universal Mercy” a heresy?

The Catholic Church sure doesn’t.

You wrote, “Universal salvation is a heresy. While we certainly would hope for it, it won’t happen.”

May I ask why you “certainly would hope for” “a heresy”?

We want and God wants everyone to be saved. However, we know it won’t happen.

I’m having trouble finding the council that said it was a heresy however the bible says that on the Last Judgement that there will be some that are dammed. Remember when Jesus tells the wicked ones to depart into the fires of hell?

Again, God does have mercy on all of us, but some of us keep refusing to follow him.

 

[theoda]

I have yet to meet someone who wants to be damned and most people who are Christian, but not practising Catholics who I have talked to on this subject think that just about everyone goes to heaven.

To use an example from my own life:
My father became agnostic because he could not reconcile what he saw in the Bible with reality. I nearly went down that path too. There are many, many convincing and often valid arguments for the Bible being erroneous or contradictory out there, and it can be very, very hard to find the answers to them (sometimes it seems like the argument has never been addressed before). I have yet to be fully convinced of the truth of the Catholic religion, because I have so many questions that have yet to be answered.

I cannot believe that my father will go to hell, because he has not rejected God. He simply doesn’t believe in God because his personal experience and knowledge tells him that there’s no God. If it was revealed to him that God was real, I can guarantee that he would be happy to come back to Catholicism. He isn’t happy with his state of non-religion, and I can tell you that I wasn’t either when I had become convinced that my Faith wasn’t true. It was terrifying, and I am still plagued with doubts and questions. Had I not been brought up so well in the Faith and been instructed as well as I have been, I wouldn’t have been able to persevere.

There are thousands of people like that, and I can’t imagine that the ones who die in that state go to hell simply for not believing.

A cradle Catholic is someone who is born into a Catholic family, and so is a Catholic from the time they are in the cradle.

Alright, I see we agree on something here. I see God as being still more merciful, but at least we have common ground regarding God’s mercy.

No, that is not true. They can believe it through misinformation, lack of information, being shown what looks like contradiction and immoral instruction from God in the Bible without ever finding the explanations (when the explanations exist).

But this isn’t necessarily representative of what happened after they died.

Their extermination served as lessons for future generations, but it is conceivable that God had mercy on them in their ignorance and didn’t condemn them to eternal punishment. Remember also that the stories of Noah’s ark and Sodom and Gomorrah would have been written thousands of years after the fact, and may in fact be moral tales, or merely based on past events. Ancient history wasn’t about the facts like modern history is. One of its primary purposes was generally to teach lessons.

First of all,you’ve never answered my question on why all of the saints say few are saved. I think the saints are very trustworthy and we should believe what they believe.

Second, if someone is ignorant won’t go to hell unless they don’t follow the natural law written in their hearts. It someone is ignorant, but they live a wicked life, they will go to hell since they chose to live a bad life. If, however, someone lives a good life and is ignorant, God, in his mercy, will find a way for that person to be properly instructed. If He doesn’t, He will make sure that the invincibly ignorant will not fall into sin because they’re ignorant.

And finally, the idea that they weren’t eternally punished in the past doesn’t work. God punished those people because they were living bad lives. Unless they repented before death,they go to hell because of mortal sin. If you don’t take the stories literally,
why else would you believe anything else? The writings of Scripture clearly show that those stories for meant to be literal, they weren’t parables. Proof of this is that in the New Testament it references Sodom and Gomorrah as if they were real places.

And again, how do you argue against the fact that every saint has believed that few are saved. Why don’t you believe in them?

 

[theoda]

Nobody knows the mind of God. We can all guess this and guess that. God can do ANYTHING! So, even a serial mass murderer can make it to heaven if God allows it! God is mercy, this i believe. Ask and it shall be given.

God knows us all individually. He knows our weaknesses. He knows who we are and what we are. I pray that God will forgive me for my sins. That he will shine his mercy on me at the time of death. This i ask of all humanity!

God bless you all

God has created us with free will. We humans have a choice of whether we want to live a good life in this world and go to heaven, or live a bad life and go to hell.

If someone rejects Christ, they obviously can’t enter heaven. The reason why Jesus died on the cross was because humans committed a sin against an infinite Being. Jesus offers Himself as an infinite sacrifice to make up for the sin. If someone would reject Jesus’s sacrifice, then the only way to make up for his sin is to suffer infinitely, or eternally.

God can do anything, but we all know He won’t interfere with our free will. You can’t change your mind after you die, because you have alread chosen and immediately we are sent to heaven or hell. God won’t send you to heaven and then ask you to change your mind.

 

[ajecphotos]

I believe that we are all given 2 roads in life to choose. One is the one that leads to God the other to Hell. Maybe each road has ‘side’ roads where we can get back to the right road?

We make mistakes, God knows this. God wants us to ask for his Mercy, his help. He wants to help us when we fall. Nobody is perfect except for God.

We have a choice. Follow God and be at his side. Ok, we will trip up many many times in life but remember God is always there to offer his hand to help us get back on track.

God wants all of his children to live with him in heaven!!

 

[ready]

Some people on this thread are talking about God’s Will like it can be thwarted–but it can not be thwarted: when He Wills something it definitely happens–and nothing Satan or a government or you or I could ever do could stop it from happening. When God wills something, it happens, and nothing can hinder it from happening. When the Scriptures says that God desires that all men be saved this means that God desires that both Jews and Gentiles be saved, not just Jews. If God willed for a reprobate soul on his deathbed to be saved, then that soul would be given efficacious grace to be saved and WOULD be saved (God’s efficacious grace would overpower him/her in such a way as to move his/her will to a conversion). But the Saints say that there are few real deathbed conversions, the reprobate–and the rest of us–pretty much die as we have lived. God gives each one of us sufficient grace to be saved, but not every one of will be saved, for what God WILLS is that the good and contrite be saved and that the evil and unrepentant be punished. We each can die a good soul, but woe to us if we die an evil soul, for the hardness of our heart could make it too difficult for us to be able to correspond with a grace of conversion that is given to us, if a grace of conversion is even offered to us by God in the first place. Our Lord has mercy on whomever He Wills, says the Scriptures, and He does not give efficacious grace to everybody. God bless you.

 

[littlestsouls2]

After reading about what many of the Saints, Doctors, Fathers and mystics have to say on this topic, I am inclined to believe that a relatively small number will be saved; very few, perhaps. In saying that, I want to provide an alternative to a few of the revelations that St. Leonard mentions.

---

But firstly, I think it’s worth saying a few things: even if everything St. Leonard refers to is 100% factual, there is no reason to say things such as: “Well, if only X number of people are saved, then I am very unlikely to be saved!” Salvation does not work like that! As Frank Sheed says: salvation is not a lottery. St. Leonard himself writes (elsewhere): “If all sinners wished to return to God with contrite and humble hearts, all would be saved.”

God antecedently wills all men to be saved; if they are lost, it is through their own fault. God is love; His every act as love. I am absolutely certain that, however many souls are damned, God is no less loving for this. Why not praise the goodness of God that seeks the salvation of all?! Why not strive to become holy so that we can assist others on the road to salvation?! As James 5:16 says: “… the continual prayer of a just man availeth much.” (Jesus allegedly said this to Venerable Margaret of the Blessed Sacrament: “Because of your prayers and sufferings I will pour out upon sinners the treasures of My merits.”)

We should spend more time thanking God for everything that He wants to give us; for everything that His immense love desires for us. He will bring this about if we let Him i.e. if we give ourselves to Him completely, and with the trust of a child. Only God can bring about good in our lives; He just seeks our cooperation and faith. We spend too much time wondering why man corresponds so poorly to God’s grace, instead of reflecting on the fact that all can, in principle, be saved, even if many will not agree to the conditions.

I believe that needed to be said.

---

Now, as to some of the revelations that St. Leonard refers to, we must keep in mind that these are not representative of mystical theology. There are a number of mystics whose revelations suggest that, while the greater number are lost, there are still many that are saved each day (most of which go to Purgatory). Two such examples are Bl. Anna Maria Taigi and St. Benedict Joseph Labre. A vision of St. Benedict Joseph Labre, for example, suggests that few go straight to Heaven, many go to Purgatory, but the greater number are lost. That might not exactly be encouraging for some, but it is a whole lot more optimistic than a handful being saved every day.

Also, Ven. Josep de Sant Benet (Joseph of St. Benedict), a Spanish Benedictine mystic, believed it was revealed to him that the majority of Catholics are saved. Is this gospel? No more than the revelation given to St. Simeon/Simon Stylites.

In my opinion, it is prudent to live as though very few will be saved; to teach that very few are possibly saved, and few probably saved; to seek the salvation of many; and to entrust ourselves and all souls to the mercy of God.

The Gospel is surely “Good News”, because, no matter who you preach it to, if they desire to be saved, they can be. Prayer can go a long way to helping souls receive this grace! And if they are not saved, there cannot possibly be any injustice on God’s part. One day, by God’s grace, we will reach Heaven, and once we are there, we will no longer need faith; we will know, beyond a shadow of a doubt - for there are no shadows in Heaven - that God is love.

Please pray that I will not be so indolent and ungrateful.

God bless.

 

[ready]

Also, Ven. Josep de Sant Benet (Joseph of St. Benedict), a Spanish Benedictine mystic, believed it was revealed to him that the majority of Catholics are saved. Is this gospel? No more than the revelation given to St. Simeon/Simon Stylites.

God bless.

I wonder if his private revelations are approved. I hope they are. God bless you.

 

[Robert_Sock]

I wonder if his private revelations are approved. I hope they are. God bless you.

Julian of Norwich had similar visions, but I do not know if they were ever approved by the Church. I’m convinced that we all live this miserable and corrupt life under different spirits which may render a person a sinner. But I also somehow believe that anybody who has the potential of loving God will somehow be saved.

 

[Robert_Sock]

The notion of Heaven and Hell from a Jewish perspective (well worth reading, and I pray that they are correct).

chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/282508/jewish/What-Happens-After-We-Die.htm

 

[ready]

The notion of Heaven and Hell from a Jewish perspective (well worth reading, and I pray that they are correct).

chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/282508/jewish/What-Happens-After-We-Die.htm

The Catholic Church is correct, you needn’t and shouldn’t look any further than the Catholic Church for theological answers. The Jewish religion is a false religion, it is not what it was before the coming of Christ. You really should stick to the Church Fathers, to the Doctors of the Church and to other Saints and accepted Catholic writers, Robert, and have nothing to do with Jewish works. You will only confuse yourself if you mix religious teachings, and will endanger your precious soul. God bless you.

 

[littlestsouls2]

I wonder if his private revelations are approved. I hope they are. God bless you.

They are, to my knowledge. Many priests have written in favour of his works. Ven. Joseph (d. 1728) also put forward this thesis in writing, and no theologians disagreed with him. It seems that St. Francis de Sales and St. Mechtilde were of the same belief.