Quotable

In view of the importance of the following topic, our quotable this month is excerpted from a reader’s letter addressed to the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention in response to the signing of the joint Catholic-Evangelical agreement not to evangelize Catholics. Perhaps other readers will be motivated to follow this Berean’s example.

I had the opportunity to ask four Catholic friends, “What must I do to be saved?” They answered thusly: 1) keep the ten commandments; 2) keep the ten commandments; 3) keep the ten commandments and, oh yes, be baptized; 4) do the best you can and pray a lot.

Since none of these is correct I decided to call the local Catholic church and ask the pastor. He told me that everyone was saved and that Muhammad, Buddha, etc. are just other names for “Jesus.”

A week or so later I heard a woman on Christian radio teaching the book of Galatians. I discovered that she was Catholic. I wrote to her and related the above. She wrote back to me: “I have been a lifelong Catholic and have never heard the gospel in the Catholic Church. I was saved outside the Catholic Church and stay in it to lead others to the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Recently I read an ad in the Evansville Courier placed by the diocese of Evansville. The ad invited questions. I wrote to ask the same question: “What must I do to be saved?” The monsignor wrote back and told me to “Pray three times a day, the prayers can be long or short, but you must pray three times a day. It doesn’t matter what the prayers are about.”

The gospel is not proclaimed in Catholicism. Catholics do not know the gospel. They depend on good works to save them.