Question:: Should it be a struggle for the average Catholic to have peace about where he/she will spend eternity? I mean, one could go to mass 50,000 times in a lifetime...and still theoretically go to hell.
Answer:
But by the same token, one could sin seriously everyday of one's life and repent on their deathbed at the last minute. The beauty of Catholic soteriology is that no one is placed in either category automatically because of some alleged external or mechanical action on God's part. Salvation is interpersonal: it is the encounter between the human person and God the Father in Christ through the Holy Spirit.
While it is THEORETICALLY possible for someone who has been pious all of their life to be lost at the last moment, how likely is that? One thing I have to agree with the 16th Century Reformers on is that we need to encourage our Catholic people to be more confident of their salvation and God's good will towards them. The problem with some Catholic spirituality is that after a whole life of piety, it makes it seem like a crap shoot as to our final destination.
Any adult Catholic who has practiced the faith, kept the laws of the Church, made regular use of the sacraments and who dies with the full benefit of the Church's rites is virtually guaranteed to go to Heaven. Such a person does not need to be perfect. After all, Jesus came to help sinners, not the righteous. When we deny ourselves of the confidence that the means of grace gives to us, we do ourselves a disservice and we fail to avail ourselves of the theological virtue of Hope.
The problem with the Reformers is that they had such a pessimistic view of human nature that they essentially despaired of being able to please God even in the state of grace. Their antidote to this was to presume on the grace of God and declared themselves saved without sufficient warrant. This is the real error of Protestantism: dialectically opposite sins against the virtue of Hope: despair and presumption.
I have thought that we Catholics need to explore the whole area of assurance more carefully on a pastoral basis and assist our faithful in understanding just where they stand before God.
Question:: Does predestination play any role in Catholic soteriology?
It certainly does. It is our belief that God knows everything that has happened, is happening and will happen. Not only that, he is responsible for ordaining what happens, both good and bad. The exact interface between God's will and our wills is an area of contention.
The 16th Century Reformers were strongly influenced by medieval nominalist philosophy and its tendency towards voluntarism. This tended to reduce man to a mere cipher and to make the will of God all powerful, even above and beyond the "mundane" concepts of good and evil.
The Catholic objection to this -- then as now -- is that man must be sufficiently autonomous from God to be morally responsible for human actions, but also sufficiently under God's control to be subject to the ordination of the Divine will. The temptation to make man FULLY autonomous (Pelagianism) or FULLY submissive (Hypercalvinism) is always there. Even some halfway compromises like Semi-pelagianism in which God and man each contribute a fractional part to the whole of salvation are not acceptable. Human actions are WHOLLY the responsibility of Man and WHOLLY under the control of God. How this works exactly is not entirely clear and is counted as a theological mystery. One can draw an analogy here to the teaching about the Incarnation that Jesus was both FULLY God and FULLY man.
So yes, your fate is fully in the hands of God who predestines your end definitively. But He does so without robbing you of free will. As St. Augustine put it, "We must pray as if everything depended on God and act as if everything depended on us."
Question:: Last question: If the Catholic church is indeed the "One True Church"....are those outside of it, especially in the reformed camp, just simply blind, brainwashed...or what? I would appreciate your thoughts on this matter.
A good question. I don't think that one answer can describe the state of every soul outside the Church. Our Lord and Savior has warned us not to judge others lest we ourselves be so judged. I think some are culpably outside the Church, some are innocent of wrong doing, and others suffer from various degrees of ambivalence. What we have to do is to pray for everyone and never fall into the trap of gloating over our own good fortune "lest [we] who would save others would [ourselves] stumble." We cannot save other people. They must act on their own behalf to obtain salvation. Our job is to provide good example to the unbeliever and to try to communicate the message of Christ in our lives. We also are enjoined to pray for them "unceasingly". Remember, in the end, God is generous beyond what we deserve and he will not give us what we deserve but what he wishes to give to us. I am optimistic and I look forward to being happily surprised with what he has planned for us all!
Art Sippo
The Catholic Legate