Expert: Griff Ruby - 4/15/2006

Question
I am a college student doing a research paper on the Justification as it pertains to the Roman Catholic Church. I need to explain it in a very clear manner in which the average person can understand. Then I need to compare/contrast it with another mainstream Christian denomination. I am having ALOT of trouble getting this information and I am now running out of time. Can you please address this for me? Thank you, Matthew

Answer
The primary cause of Justification is the Sacrifice on the Cross of our Lord Himself.  This paid the cost of our sins and our separation from God, providing the basis that we, having sinned, can nevertheless approach God for sanctity and forgiveness.
More directly, justification is that condition of a soul in a state of sanctifying Grace, right with God, forgiven of its sins, and overcoming sins.  He who dies justified is saved.
One important thing about justification as understood by the Church is that justification is inextricably linked with sanctification.  Obviously none of us in this life (Jesus Himself and His holy Mother are the two known exceptions, unless you also count Adam and Eve prior to their fall) attains full and perfect sanctity (sinlessness).  But what is required is that we have an abhorrence for all sin, a genuine striving to avoid it at all costs, atoned for them in what limited way justice enables, and begged of the God we adore forgiveness for what we could never ourselves atone for.  Our station in Heaven is determined, not by how many sins are overcome or how completely, but by the vigor of our striving itself for true holiness, and that vigor itself is a Grace from God that we could never dredge up from our own resources but must ask of God.
The following quotes may be helpful as to Justification:  "The sanctification of the soul of man by God's grace which elevates the perfection of the soul; it normally begins with the grace of faith which leads to repentance.  This grace is not merited and assists the free will to dispose itself to the acquiring of perfection, but in the adult acts of cooperation such as contrition, faith, etc., are necessary.  It is the regaining of sanctifying grace by a soul; the regaining of the friendship of God; the state of never having lost the state of sanctifying grace."  "In its active sense, Justification is the act of God declaring and making a person just; in its passive sense, it is the change in a soul which passes from the state of sin to that of sanctifying grace or justice.  At the time of the Reformation, the following Protestant errors became current:  (a) Faith alone is the necessary disposition for justification; (b) justifying faith is a mere confidence in the divine mercy; (c) justification is separable from sanctification; it is a mere juridical declaration that the sinner will not be punished, and that sanctification itself [being redefined by the Protestants] is but a cloaking of sin and an extrinsic imputation of the merits of Christ."
The Protestant notion gravely damages this doctrine by using the mere forgiveness of God alone as some kind of magic talisman to hide one's continuing sins behind.  It accuses God of self-deception, the exalted All-Perfect God, of the basest and most knavish and degraded of all sins, self-deception.  In the Protestant notion, "God" would suposedly see in looking at one, not the sinner in his sins, but only "His" own sinlessness, declaring holy that which is still a voluntary slave to sin.
What would Heaven be like, filled with such "forgiven sinners" who, on account of their own non-opposed lusts, would quarrel among themselves in Heaven as much as they did here on earth?  For forgiveness would thereby have been given out to those who continue to love iniquity, hiding behind a facade of Christ's perfection, "God" himself, choosing to see them not how they in fact are, but only as they ought to be.
In like manner a man could be infatuated with some woman for her physical beauty, and therefore see in her all manner of nobility, honesty, sincerity, chastity, loyalty, dilligence, and overall worthiness, while all others see her for what she really is, small-minded, vain, petty, cheap, lazy, and having very much some agenda of her own not at all what a man would seek.  If he takes her into his hearth and home and family through marriage, what misery is upon him once the reality of who she really is gets suddenly thrust upon him in such close quarters.  So would it be if God simply forgave sinners and admit them into His Heaven, without also requiring of them their sanctification.
God is wiser than the foolish man in that illustration, for true justification requires sanctification, even as a wise man in seeking a bride, seeks she who will make for a good and happy marriage through her virtue and all good interior qualities.
Nor can it be claimed that such forgiven sinners, simply upon entering Heaven, suddenly become sinless saints, for then they would not be themselves but brand new persons merely displacing the old, like simply destroying you and then replacing you with an imitation "you" that has nothing in common with you.  That would be like the foolish man in the above illustration "marrying" the sinful woman by killing her off and manufacturing a robot with her looks and yet also all the good qualities that the actual woman out there never possessed.
In the Catholic understanding, we labor in this life towards becoming the saints we are meant to be in Heaven, that what remaining sins and imperfections as we may still possess are gladly dispensed with and left behind as we enter Heaven, thus it is truly us who are in Heaven and not some replacement artificial people.
For the Incarnation is about Sinlessness entering in this world, not merely in some legal or technical or symbolic sense, but actually and literally.  I hope all of this helps, God bless!