What do Catholics think happens to Dead Protestants?

[Giovanni]

Well, here is what I think, and I could be wrong.
But God will judge them as He judges catholics, He is the only one who knows the content of our hearts, and just like all of us, catholics, lutherans and so forth, some will get to heaven and some wont.
One thing for sure, they will ask our Lord, “who is that beautiful Lady over there, she looks like a queen”. Our Lord will then remind them that “she is my Mother, the one you turned away from while on earth”. I am sure they will sincerily apologize to our Lord and our Mother and life in heaven will be just as beautiful for them as for those of us who are blessed to get there.
Wonder if we will be tempted to say “I told you who she was”. I doubt it.

I love my Mom

 

[julebenn]

As a Protestant I believe I’m saved because I believe he gave his one and only son and I believe and trust in him for my salvation. NOT because of the church I belong to or any other reason. And I honestly LOVE him with all my heart and seek him.

Protestants, Catholic or whatever it’s all about Jesus, there is no other name.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

 

[anamchara]

As a Protestant I believe I’m saved because I believe he gave his one and only son and I believe and trust in him for my salvation. NOT because of the church I belong to or any other reason. And I honestly LOVE him with all my heart and seek him.

Protestants, Catholic or whatever it’s all about Jesus, there is no other name.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

And as a Catholic Julebenn, I support you on this we all strive to live the good life that God desires for us, I believe you are a sister in Christ and I would rather focus on what we have in common then not

 

[bunbun]

As a Protestant I believe I’m saved because I believe he gave his one and only son and I believe and trust in him for my salvation. NOT because of the church I belong to or any other reason. And I honestly LOVE him with all my heart and seek him.
Protestants, Catholic or whatever it’s all about Jesus, there is no other name.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Apart from the sentence starting with “NOT” these are statements that all Catholics could agree with!

The point of divergence is entirely due to our different understanding of Church. For Catholics and other non-reformed traditions (including the Oriental and the Orthodox), the Church is more than the power structures, the human faces or even the assemblies and congregations we seen every week. The Church is rather primarily the Body of Christ through which all of God’s love is sent out in the Spirit. So in that sense, we (along with Orthodox and Orientals etc) see no difference between insisting that it is only through the credal “Holy, Catholic and Apostolic” Church that we are saved, and that we only have eternal life through Jesus who is the Christ and Son of God. The two statements have, for us, overlapping meanings.

On a more practical level, if one thinks that the church serves a merely operational and incidental role (especially in salvation), much of Acts, the Pauline epistles, immediate post-apostolic (second generational) accounts of Christian concerns from the first and second century such as Polycarp of Smyrna or Ignitius of Antioch becomes rather irrelevant and bizarre.

Luther and Calvin started a brave experiment to see whether it was possible to have a more direct experience of Christianity without the “intervention” of historical structures. Looking back at their efforts now, it is clear that alternative traditions and historical structures have since been acquired by these reformed traditions to replace ones that they abandoned. It is hard to be much more optimistic that similar efforts today for a “direct Christian experience” will prove more fruitful.

Before the reformation, “mainline” Christians did not have such a strong aversion against the notion that Divine and Salvic Grace could be divinely instituted to reside in apparently unworthy or “earthy” forms. Our Sacraments are precisely a reminder that our God chose to use the messiness and nitty-grittiness of the incarnation not to mention an extremely brutal death to demonstrate his efficacious love for us.

Catholics believe that our “historical structure” have a divine institution, and has Christ as its head, and that the full extent of this “hidden glory in Christ” will become clear at the close of play.