Karen10:
So I really don’t like this question, and pondering the answer would seem to me, to require that you look around and judge people, which is a bad thing to do. As sinners, we are required to be humble.
Just to clarify, the way I understand it is:
It’s within the bounds of our teaching, as the one holy and apostolic Church, to say that yes, a pious Catholic will be better off than a pious non-Catholic. It’s logical. They will better be able to fulfill God’s Will (including not sinning), because they know and believe more about it, and because they have the true sacraments that come with corresponding graces.
Remember that a sin is still an act against God’s will, even if the person didn’t intend to go against God. So a non-Catholic who doesn’t know that birth control is wrong, for example, is still doing something wrong, although their culpability is reduced to some unknown extent (and in some cases, eliminated completely) by the mitigating circumstance of lack of knowledge.
This is why we’re exhorted to beef up on our knowledge of the faith. And we have a lot more knowledge on our side. We’re better able to not transgress against God, the more we know. What individual Catholics do with this knowledge, and how open they are to learning, depends on choices they make; an individual’s indifference in this regard has no bearing on the fact that the truth is there for the asking and that the Catholic Church is the one true Church.
The danger in examining whether Catholics sin less, is that of becoming judgmental (bad), and that you look to the wrong persons–and too big of a sample–in order to extrapolate and come to unfair conclusions.
It’d seem to me that it would constitute disobeying Jesus and breeding animosity, would not witness properly to the faith, and would probably lead to one failing to look inwardly enough to reckon with their own sinfulness. So I wouldn’t go there, personally.
We do pray for sinners, though, including ourselves. It’s not presumptuous to say that we’re all sinners. We know as much. We’re not presuming to judge the state of any one individual’s soul, in doing so, though. We can pray for someone to see a Truth where it seems obvious that they don’t get something, for their conversion, and for our loved ones who have passed on, or even for other things not related to sin, such as their health. These prayers are done out of charity for them, and in doing so, we’re ideally not forgetting that we ourselves are sinners, or presuming to know individual’s souls as God sees them, or condemning them.
So I would feel confident in saying that a Catholic has much more available to them, in the way of attaining Heaven. To defect from the Church when you know this is a grave mistake. But I would be extremely uneasy with looking at individual Catholics and non-Catholics, and appraising what I see, without knowing what their individual mitigating circumstances are, without knowing how much God could have revealed to them personally, and without knowing everything they do for God, etc.
