Although one of the above posters may be correct in that the best answer you will get will be in the apologetics forum, this is not such a mystery that you can’t get a simple straightforward answer.
As a reference, you can look online for the Council of Trent, Session 6 text and it will give you what follows below but with a lot of explanations and terms put in there. Remember, one purpose of that Council was to present an answer to the Reformers, so you will see various aspects of Reformed ideas countered throughout the text.
Basically, Catholic salvation works like this. It starts with Baptism, which the Council calls “the first plank.” In that Sacrament, original sin is removed (infant)/original + all other sin removed (adult), symbolized by the pouring of water (cleaning the soul, if you will). Note that it is NOT the water that does the cleaning; it’s just a symbol. God does the cleaning. As the soul is cleansed, sanctifying grace (a “saving grace”) is poured into the soul (the term is infused). It is the presence of that sanctifying grace in the soul upon which we believe our eternal reward is ultimately eternal life in heaven.
That grace stays in the soul until or unless the person commits a sin so grevious in nature that it “kills” that grace. That type of sin is
mortal sin, from the same word we use when speaking of a
mortality rate. It means death… the death of that sanctifying grace. It is here where a major difference in Catholic and Reformed doctrines show up. In Reformed religions, saved is saved, you don’t lose it. In Catholic belief, you DO lose it if you commit mortal sin. Thus Catholics have something Reformed believers do not - a way to get it back.
The Council of Trent calls this “the second plank, for those who have made shipwreck of their souls,” a reference to a phrase in one of St. Paul’s epistles. This is the Sacrament of Reconciliation, or it’s more common name, Confession. Here there are three things necessary on the part of the person who has lost their sanctifying grace and wants to get it back:
- There must be a contrite rejection of the sin, a desire to turn away from it
- There must be sacerdotal confession of the sin (confession to a priest)
- The person must perform the penance given to him by the Priest.
The other part of Reconciliation is priestly absolution. That’s why confession isn’t heard at Billy Bob’s house out in the garage on Thursday nights, because Billy Bob does not have authority to stand in the person of Christ, or
in persona Christi as the ordained priest does. Note here that just as the water in Baptism isn’t actually removing the sin, neither is the priest. It is God who is doing the forgiving; the priest acts sort of as Christ’s voice in pronouncing the sins forgiven. Sin is removed, and sanctifying grace is again infused in the soul. Should the person commit a mortal sin after that, they must repeat the second plank, (i.e. - go to confession and have the sin removed/grace restored).
So you can see that asking a Catholic “are they saved?” can produce different answers depending on whether they are in that state of sanctifying grace or not. Catholics don’t like to count their chickens before they hatch, so to speak, so while we have faith we will get a reward commensurate with our state of grace at the time of death, we don’t presume to definitively pronounce "what God
will do with us. There could be something in us Christ as our judge would see that we don’t. But again, that’s not to say we walk around answering that question with a shoulder shrug. We have faith that what we do will result in reward.
Penance is a confusing thing sometimes because it can seem to Reformers that we find Christ’s sacrifice insufficient, or even worse, that God would. It isn’t. It’s more than sufficient to do anything with us He will. But we believe that a person’s attitude and how they live and respond to grace counts for something. This is not exactly the same but is a similar concept to how Reformers view how a person claiming to be saved lives, and if they live licentiously, it begs the question if they were truly saved at all.
This “something” we call merit. Now the Catholic church recognizes two different kinds of merit: condign merit (
meritum de condigno) and congruous merit (
meritum de congruo). To understand the difference, think about a courtroom and a judge and a person on trial for something. If the defendant did something of merit, something really spectacular, such a meritorious act would actually impose an obligation on the judge to recognize that merit, and if he didn’t, the defendant would actually suffer an INjustice as a result. That would be condign merit. Congruous merit is real merit but is not in the same league. Instead of imposing an obligation on the judge, it would be more like giving the judge a good reason to reduce the sentence. Appropriate versus mandatory, in other words. That’s what our penances result in… congruous merit.
Now stacking that small but significant merit up against the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, of course there is no comparison at all. Anything we do pales by comparison. But there is a reason for having it, or more to the point, trying to earn it by doing those penances. Think of Jesus’ parable about the 3 servants and the talents. These merits are the famous (or infamous) “works” of the Catholics. This is just the very tip of the iceberg as it relates to penance, and I’ve not done a very thorough job explaining the “why” of it to you. But suffice it to say that in a side-by-side comparison using some of the Solas, it would look like this:
Reformed: Sola Fide (Faith alone)
Catholic: Faith + works
I think that will give you a good start.
