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Good evening Father Angelo,

My name is Federico and I am a young man of 20 who in recent months has reconnected with the faith after a fairly long period of spiritual dozing.

Inevitably this process was accompanied by the emergence of questions, doubts and perplexities, some of which were answered and others only partially.

In particular, last week, consulting your column offered me new food for thought which I would like to submit to you here.

Before continuing, I would like to thank you and your (if any) staff for the service you offer.

There are two issues I would like to raise (there would be more but I don’t want to put too many irons in the fire): I will try to explain them briefly and please correct me if my reasoning starts from false or unorthodox assumptions.

1) Christian-Catholic doctrine states that the presupposition of individual salvation is to die in a state of grace. So far, nothing to object to.

What is difficult for me to understand is how the state of grace can be linked to objective and “human” categories. Let me explain better with examples.

For the Church, the sacrament of Confession remits the entire accumulation of mortal sins, so after a well-made confession, as after Baptism, the individual is authorized to consider himself in a state of grace and, to put it briefly, has in his pocket the ticket to Paradise.

But here the problem arises: how can man, a man who has been told “remember that you are dust and to dust you will return”, boast rights towards God?

How can human conventions, however sacred, constrain God’s choices? This seems like an unheard of claim to me. For example, we all imagine Saint Francis and Father Kolbe in Heaven and Hitler and Pol Pot in Hell. But, even if this were the case, the moment we accept God’s omnipotence we should conclude that He, at the moment of choice, was completely free to make the opposite decision.

And the reasoning could be extended to all the occasions in which God pours out his grace on men. The problem is that by doing so you risk slipping into Protestantism at the very least. If it is God who always has the last word, then the sacraments of the Church are emptied of the role that Catholicism assigns to them, i.e. that of privileged channels of God’s grace, and retain only a symbolic or, at most, dedicatory meaning. In the sense: “I baptize you but then the “true” Baptism, the one valid for the purposes of eternal health, is up to God to grant it to you. At most, with the first I can only invoke the second, without having the certainty that it will happen.” At this point even the Confession would no longer make any sense.

In short, what I ask you is: how is it possible that from an absolutely Orthodox premise (the absolute omnipotence of God) one can reach more than Protestant conclusions? How can the omnipotence of God and the role of the Church be reconciled?

Priest’s answer

Dear Federico,

1. I am happy with your coming closer to Jesus Christ.

Getting closer to faith is not the same as simply getting closer to certain principles. In this case it would be an ideology.

Getting closer to faith instead coincides with getting closer to a divine Person, made flesh.

It follows that by getting closer to such a Person we also get closer to his teaching.

2. The problem you posed to me probably comes from the fact that you are not clear on the concept of grace.

Sanctifying grace is a divine germ, and therefore of a supernatural order, infused by God into us.

By virtue of this divine seed we become participants in the divine nature and that is, we become by grace what the Word, the Son, Jesus Christ is by nature.

3. As you may have noticed, I wrote that we become partakers of the divine nature.

We do not become God. We remain human people, but participants of the divine nature.

Somehow in the same way that iron placed in a fire catches fire. It remains iron, but becomes part of the nature of fire.

4. Through grace, we become children of God by adoption.

God is not obliged to adopt us as his children.

But if he does it, he obliges himself to us in the same way that a father who adopts a child obliges himself to him.

5. God himself has established means through which we can acquire grace, recover it, increase it. They are the sacraments.

6. Now neither grace nor the sacraments are human conventions, but they are gifts of God. They are realities of a supernatural order.

7. Therefore we are saved by virtue of God’s grace freely accepted by each of us.

If we are damned, we are damned because we reject the grace that God offers us.

Wishing you a continued growth in the life of grace, in supernatural communion with God, I bless you and assure you of my prayers.

Father Angelo