To what extent can I hope for the salvation of all souls?

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DeepDeepTrouble3

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According to the CCC, I can hope for the salvation of everyone. To what extant? It’s not a feigned hope, is it? It has to be a real hope of some kind, a hope with real merit. The CCC wouldn’t ask me to pray for a feigned hope…would it?

I believe that the majority of people go to at least purgatory at their death, but I also know that the Lord is also coming again to judge the living and the dead at the Second Coming, and HE was the one to say, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
 
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Unless you can peer into the souls over eveyrone, what we have is hope and reliance on the mercy of God. Only He knows. We’re called to simply pray and do what we can to be a faithful example of holiness ourselves.
 
It’s an individual consideration. So, while you can hope that God saves this guy, and that gal, and this one, and that one… and point to each and every person who has lived or who ever will live…

you can’t say, as a blanket statement, “God saves everyone” as if it were a group salvation.

Does that help?
 
I think that this is a profoundly important question. I think it’s somewhere near the top of a logical chain of how you interpret Catholic doctrine. Because I see two groups of people on CAF, one who seem to think that a tiny percentage of people will be saved and the others who think the majority will be. I’m in the latter camp for a simple reason; i have a reasonable grasp of human psychology.

If we can cut to the chase, most people don’t have a problem avoiding murder, worshiping false gods or stealing etc. The harder challenges are usually to do with personal desires (e.g. lust), hence the ever growing body of masturbation threads on here.

Now if you really believe that only a small fractions of humans are getting saved then basically you are arguing that heaven is ~85% full of a-sexual people. A-sexual people don’t experience lust period, they literally have no sex drive. It requires zero effort for them to abstain from lust, we’ve already established that avoiding murdering people isn’t all that hard and therefore they must be going to heaven because of their birth fluke. That’s just not the God i believe in.

So then you have the rest of us who think people who sinned, sometimes badly, will get into heaven because they make a sincere apology and beg for mercy. Now that’s an on-going battle right up to the time of judgement so if you’re with my logic up to here then it makes absolute sense to hope for the salvation of all souls.
 
Also what bothers me, is that Adam is forgiven. He is the very reason why sin is in this world. If Adam is forgiven, then why not everyone else who sins because of him?
 
No, it doesn’t help me too much. Why do you say it must be individual?
 
I wonder if the comments of Saint Pope John Paul II make it permissible for me to inquire into this beyond a simple black and white eternal hell for the damned, but rather, maybe that belief is disciplinary.
 
He is believed to have repented.

We need to repent! Those who sinned have already sinned, turn from it! I do not think we should persist in sin! Indeed, repentance!
 
DeepDeepTrouble3 said:
No, it doesn’t help me too much. Why do you say it must be individual?
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I say it because there are two distinct questions that can be asked.

On one hand, I can ask “does God save all people, out of hand, by virtue of them being people?”

On the other hand, I can ask, “does God extend the possibility of salvation to each person, individually, and depending on their personal response to His invitation?”

The answer to the first question, as a matter of doctrine of the Church, is “no”. The answer to the second is “yes.”
 
Can you cite any sources for the information that Saint JPII recanted?
 
Trying to follow your logic -
Are you saying that since some people do not have to contend with lust, then in fairness, no one should face judgement for lust?

Also, the battle which you mention is up to the time of death, not the time of judgement.
 
No that’s not what i’m saying. I’m saying that some people have harder battles than others. Your propensity to sin is in no small part influenced by interactions between your personality and your environment, the latter of which is dynamic. For example: why on earth should i get any credit for avoiding homosexual relations when i never had the desire for them in the first place, it literally took me zero effort.
 
You realise i’m not saying 100% of people will be saved? I’m saying you can never full know the context of a persons sins well enough to know which side they will come out on, and therefore there’s always hope for that individual.
 
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