I was reading this article on www.carm.org, a Christian apologetics site with Catholicism conspicuously in its 'other' section. Read it if you like. I just wanted to focus on the bits which quoted the CCC. The bold bits are the ones which they quoted. In case you're feeling lazy, I put the bits that were altogether less damning in italics, though I do not presume to say that you could not have spotted them yourself:
2022 The divine initiative in the work of grace precedes, prepares, and elicits the free response of man. Grace responds to the deepest yearnings of human freedom, calls freedom to cooperate with it, and perfects freedom.
[...]
2025 We can have merit in God's sight only because of God's free plan to associate man with the work of his grace. Merit is to be ascribed in the first place to the grace of God, and secondly to man's collaboration. Man's merit is due to God.
2026 The grace of the Holy Spirit can confer true merit on us, by virtue of our adoptive filiation, and in accordance with God's gratuitous justice. Charity is the principal source of merit in us before God.
2027 No one can merit the initial grace which is at the origin of conversion. Moved by the Holy Spirit, we can merit for ourselves and for others all the graces needed to attain eternal life, as well as necessary temporal goods.
2006 The term "merit" refers in general to the recompense owed by a community or a society for the action of one of its members, experienced either as beneficial or harmful, deserving reward or punishment. Merit is relative to the virtue of justice, in conformity with the principle of equality which governs it.
2007 With regard to God, there is no strict right to any merit on the part of man. Between God and us there is an immeasurable inequality, for we have received everything from him, our Creator.
[...]
2009 Filial adoption, in making us partakers by grace in the divine nature, can bestow true merit on us as a result of God's gratuitous justice. This is our right by grace, the full right of love, making us "co-heirs" with Christ and worthy of obtaining "the promised inheritance of eternal life."[60] The merits of our good works are gifts of the divine goodness.[61] "Grace has gone before us; now we are given what is due.... Our merits are God's gifts."[62]
I'm sure you'll see there's enough italicising to be going on with. The upshot of this kind of decontextualisation is this, so far as I can see; two options:
- The author believes Roman Catholicism abominable enough to warrant unjustly polarising its teaching into ready-to-denounce form.
- The author really is too simple/lazy to examine the context.
Neither option has a great deal to commend it. This kind of thing happens rather a lot, as I say. G.K. Chesterton maintained, providing a good quantity of examples, that any stick seems good enough for Catholicism's opponents to beat it with, usually from two contradictory directions. Perhaps this is the case.
