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A Tough One - Part 2
St. Leonard of Port Maurice had good intentions. I do believe his purpose was to alert people who supposed the “odds were in their favor” or who presumed the mercy of God regardless of how they lived, or to alert hardened life-long mortal sinners to the danger they were in. And, Jesus Himself does say that many are on the path to destruction, and that few are chosen.
On the other hand, I do have a few objections to St. Leonard. The first is that he makes it sound like God is a loser. For every 100,000 people only two go to Heaven? You can hear the devil sneering, “Hey God! I just got 99,998 souls! How many did you get?” He makes it sound like the Church is failing terribly in its mission.
When Jesus was asked if the saved will be many or few, that in itself is the point. Jesus only responded when He was asked about it. Jesus did not go around telling people that most of them were going to hell. Jesus taught and preached in parables that revealed God the Father to the world, to anyone who would listen. Imagine Jesus, preaching to the multitudes when He gave the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven; Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Oh, and by the way, most of you are going straight to hell.”
Imagine a car dealer, whose objective is to sell as many cars as he can, advertising this way: “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, for every 100,000 cars we sell, only two last more than a year or so. All the rest crash and the drivers are killed.” How many cars will he sell?
I doubt very, very much if the Apostles, in their missions to do as Jesus commanded, to “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” made sure that the people they were evangelizing understood clearly that 99.9% of them were damned.
To tell people that most are damned destroys hope. Many who hear this will probably think that if only 2 out of every 100,000 people make it to Heaven, then what chance to do they have? And it destroys any incentive to evangelize. Why should we bother if most of the people we reach are damned anyway?
St. Leonard, in his sermon, always says only that most Catholics are damned. Evidently, all others don’t even register, as if it goes without saying that they are all damned. The problem is that when Jesus was asked by someone if the saved are many or few, there were no Catholics at that time. There was no Catholic Church yet, and not even any Christians at all. Jesus must have meant all of humanity.
But again, salvation isn’t about numbers and percentages. It’s not about trying to figure out your chances, or what the odds are. To tell Catholics that most of them are damned will likely cause tremendous despair. Many will likely think that the Sacraments are useless, that their sins are not forgiven and that God doesn’t love them, all of which is false.
We should not make entire sermons about this. What we should do is to address the matter when it comes up, as in the Lectionary. We respond when appropriate just the same as Jesus did. When asked, He told the truth. Jesus revealed God the Father to the world. He didn’t come with a chart of statistics and percentages, nor was the first thing He said to people was that most are damned. To be continued . . .
Blessings In Jesus,
Fr. David