What Catholics Believe about Salvation

Vatican Insider:

“It’s true, Jesus has saved us all, but not in generically. Everyone, but each individual, first and last name,” the Pope said. “And this is personal salvation. Really I am saved, the Lord looked at me, He gave His life for me, opened this door, this new path for me, and each of us can say ‘for me’. But there is a danger of forgetting that He saved us individually, but as part of a people. A people. The Lord always saves the people. From the moment when He called Abraham, when He promised to make a people. And the Lord saves us as part of a people. This is why the author of this letter tells us: ‘we must encourage one another’. There is no salvation for me alone. If I understand salvation in this way, I am wrong, I have taken the wrong path. The privatization of salvation is the wrong path.”

The Argentinian Pope gave three criteria for not privatising salvation: ‘Faith in Jesus who purifies us’, hope that ‘stirs us to look at his promises and go forward’ and charity: namely taking care of each other, to encourage us all to practice charity and good works’.” “And when I’m in a parish, in a community — or whatever it is – I am there, I can privatize salvation and be there only on a small social level.  But in order not to privatize salvation, I need to ask myself if I speak and communicate the faith, speak and communicate hope, speak, practice and communicate charity.  If within a particular community there is no communication between people and no encouragement is given to everybody to practice these three virtues, the members of that community have privatized their faith.  Each of them is looking for his or her personal salvation, not the salvation of everybody, the salvation of their people.  And Jesus saved all of us but as part of his people, within a Church.” The Pope pointed out that St. Paul “gave some very important practical advice: ‘Do not absent yourself from your own assemblies, as some do.’  He said this happens when we’re at such assemblies, in the parish or community and we judge the others, when there’s this kind of scorn towards the others.  This, Pope Francis stressed, is not the new and living way of Jesus. They scorn the others, they stay away from the community as a whole, they stay away from the people of God, they have privatized salvation: salvation is for me and my small group, but not for all the people of God.  And this is a very serious mistake.  It’s what we see and call: ‘the ecclesial elites’.  When these small groups are created within the community of God’s people, these people believe they are being good Christians and also are acting in good faith maybe, but they are small groups who have privatized salvation.”