ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS

New Zealand Tablet, 27 November 1919, Page 13

ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS

Inquirer.— No; not necessary.

J.W.—(l) Of course, God is the only judge of a man’s fitness for heaven or hell. But God can surely give knowledge to the society He has left on earth to pronounce on the state of particular persons, in the other world. The Church has this knowledge—such is Catholic teaching—and exercises it in the matter of the canonisation of saints. The Church does not make pronouncements on the likelihood or certainty of this or that person being in hell. Yet the Scripture, God’s inspired Word, speaks in such an unusually severe and striking way of Solomon and Judas that Catholic scholars and Catholic people generally have always believed that those two unfortunate men are now paying the eternal penalty of their own fully deliberate sin. (2) You have not quite grasped the significance of the ceremony of the renenwal of baptismal vows. It is not a question of solemn vows at all, but a serious promise. Afterwards to break that promise would of course be a sin. If it is not possible to fulfil the promise, there is no sin whatever in one’s failure. Catholics who make a promise of this sort understand all this quite well. And so the missioner was quite right.