You can’t honestly believe that if God knows the heart of the sinner who is sincerely sorry for his sins that if he doesn’t confess to a priest in standard Catholic practice that God’s going to send that person to hell.
It would depend on the circumstances, though, and it’s as cut and dry as you make it out to be. The appeal to CCC 1452 is precisely the case you present – but, that doesn’t mean that there are other cases that we can presume.
More to the point, we
can say that a well-catechized Catholic, who does not present himself for confession but rather, simply is contrite (without resolving to go to confession),
will, in fact, not receive absolution of his sins.
If God did that, then God would* NOT be just, and God* is** just.
No – if God did that, He would be
just… but not
merciful. Big difference.
His WORD tells us that he is quick to forgive and those who call on his name will be saved.
Yes, He is “quick to forgive”; and the means that He gives us by which we “call on his name” in order to be saved is sacramental confession.
Furthermore, did you know that there is a saint who is in heaven who made NO church sacraments?
The Church does not say that all the unbaptized are condemned, and neither am I making that assertion. This is a red herring…
The emperor was not too happy with his conversion and had him executed. He never had Baptism in the usual sense, he never had Holy Communion in the traditional sense. Yet, he is STILL a saint canonized by the church.
Yes – do you know what that implies? He participated in a baptism by blood – being martyred for the faith – and the grace he received was as effecacious as water baptism itself. Therefore, having had his sins forgiven through this ‘baptism’, he was in a state of grace at his death, and thus attained to heaven. It’s not a question of “no sacraments” – since he
did receive the graces of baptism! – and so this doesn’t demonstrate what you think it demonstrates…
We must be very careful not to make the sacraments or the church teachings or officials themselves ‘God’.
Amen!
They are channels for grace. They are to be respected and cherished. They are not God himself though. There are those who follow everything to the tee and will still go to hell because they aren’t really following Christ but their pride.
Really? Are you serious, or just speaking loosely?
Here’s the thing – yes, it’s possible for someone to follow external observances but are not actually living a life of faith. That
doesn’t mean they’re “follow[ing] everything to the tee”, as you assert – it means only that they’re “doing Church stuff” without believing in it. It would mean that they’re not “discerning the Body” and are thus “eating and drinking condemnation.” It would be for these reasons – and not that they’re making an ‘idol’ of processes – that they lack grace. To assert otherwise is to obfuscate what’s in play…
I hope it doesn’t seem like I am picking on you.)
No problems.
The weakness of your case, though, is that it plays the magician’s ‘misdirection’ trick: by pointing to one person in the wrong, you take our attention of someone else in the wrong. In this case, both of them – the person who follows the observances of the Church but doesn’t interiorize them, and the person who might think he’s interiorized them but refuses to follow Christ’s Word – are in danger. And, at least the person who follows external observances is truly receiving God’s grace, and stands a better chance of being able to turn his situation around.
