Please check out this post from a Catholic college professor and let me know what you think about it. Hereâs part of it to get your attention.
"But many Catholics to this day have not learned the Catholic and biblical doctrine. They think we are saved by good intentions or being nice or sincere or trying a little harder or doing a sufficient number of good deeds. Over the past twenty-five years I have asked hundreds of Catholic college students the question: If you should die tonight and God asks you why he should let you into heaven, what would you answer? The vast majority of them simply do not know the right answer to this, the most important of all questions, the very essence of Christianity. They usually do not even mention Jesus!
Until we Catholics know the foundation, Protestants are not going to listen to us when we try to teach them about the upper stories of the building. Perhaps God allows the Protestant/Catholic division to persist not only because Protestants have abandoned many precious truths taught by the Church but also because many Catholics have never been taught the most precious truth of all, that salvation is a free gift of grace, accepted by faith. I remember vividly the thrill of discovery when, as a young Protestant at Calvin College, I read Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent on justification. I did not find what I had been told I would find, âanother gospelâ of do-it-yourself salvation by works, but a clear and forceful statement that we can do nothing without Godâs grace, and that this grace, accepted by faith, is what saves us".
catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0027.html
:banghead: Did you actually read this? Heâs talking about the false doctrine of
saved by works alone, which the Catholic Church very much rejects. This doesnât mean saved by faith
alone is correct.
For the 5 billionth time, itâs save by
grace alone, with the necessary response of faith
working through love. No one here has ever said, at least in any post Iâve read that we are saved by works alone!!! That doesntâ mean we arenât judged on the merits of our works, which is deomonstrated very clearly in the bible. The thing is, with out Faith you essentially donât get a trail, you get Judged based upon your outright rejection of God to begin with. If you have the faith, then terrific!! You get a trail! Then God Judges you, based upon the merits of your works, and not the merits of your faith, which is where protestants have gone all wrong.
