+St. Lawrence, Martyr+

A sad form of rigorism still seems to be afoot that would deny those converting towards the end of their lives the hope of salvation. In his classic work Sinners Return to God, written in 1897, Rev. Michael Mueller calls out to the hardened sinner to return to the God who gave joy to his youth, the religion into which he was received or was born. It is often quoted as proof that deathbed repentance or “conversion” is not something favored by the Church, as Rev. Mueller points out, and this is very true concerning the state of certainly baptized Catholics who were raised in the faith and later abandoned it, Catholics who have stubbornly delayed their return to the Church. Of such errant Catholics Rev. Nicholas Walsh, S. J., says in his 1898 work, The Saved and the Lost:

“It may sound harsh and seem strange to say that there is a class of persons who appear to be in greater danger of being lost than the pagan or negative infidel, the grossly ignorant or the simple followers of sects and schisms: namely heretics and schismatics of the educated class. These, as a rule, by profession and education, know much of Holy Scripture and reference it as the word of God; believe in most if not all the fundamental truths of Christianity; are not ignorant of history and live in countries where the Catholic Church is carrying on Her mission. The danger would also seem to increase in proportion to their education, knowledge and nearness to the Church. They know too much and have gone too far not to have the thought forced on them that they should learn a little more and go a little further. It is scarcely possible that such persons have not, from time to time, some misgivings as to their religious position and that light is not almost forced on them as to the paramount claims of the Catholic Church.”

So often the mistake is made today of believing that what is said of those assumed to be validly baptized Catholics now applies to the majority of those simply professing to be Catholic. Some of these may or may not be validly baptized; some may assume they have been sufficiently educated in the faith when in fact they have been grossly misled or propagandized to an extent almost impossible to reverse. These are the grossly ignorant or blind followers of LibTrad and other sects. But there are yet others, and not a few, who have a greater knowledge of Holy Scripture and matters of faith who choose to mislead or be misled and to ignore the warnings that they are not properly drawing out conclusions from what they know and therefore are leading others astray. These are the souls, who, if they do not turn from their evil ways, are in grave danger of perishing as unrepentant sinners.

The  grossly ignorant or the simple followers of sects and schisms are not guiltless but are not as harshly judged, for they have followed either the bad example of their relatives or followed LibTrad pseudo-clergy.  And there are various classes of individuals peculiar to our times who are seldom considered here but are frequently misclassified as insincerely repentant on their death. These are the unbaptized, those raised with little thought at all of God; who knew little or nothing of the Catholic faith, even though they may have been validly baptized. Also included here are those converted and baptized only shortly before death and those suffering from mental illness; or physical illness that profoundly impacts their mental capacity. And yet those calling themselves Catholic seem to feel no compunction in including such individuals alongside the certainly baptized and those enjoying the use of a sound mind, something Canon Law and Church teaching certainly does not support.

As an example, consider the case of an individual who feels attracted by the Catholic faith, even in these sad times. Perhaps they have friends or relatives who they believe are Catholic; or maybe they have been influenced by some profound event that makes them sympathetic to the faith. Let us say they are great sinners, addicted to certain vices they fight, but are not able to overcome. But without the grace of true conversion or Baptism, how are they able to overcome them without the prayers of the Catholics they know and their loved ones, should they be Catholic? And even with such prayers, as the great catechist Rev. John Kearney teaches in his Our Greatest Treasure, “…the difficulty in making the final step” to conversion, a pain-filled journey that often took even the best educated non-Catholics literally “years” to complete, is very difficult. “Hence the necessity of a very strong grace,” and who among us are worthy of declaring when God might grant this grace and to whom?

Is it not a miracle that without a visible Church, without confessors, the Holy Sacrifice and the Sacraments, anyone is ever attracted to the faith today at all? How much easier was repentance and conversion, when all one needed to do was approach the priest for instruction or the Sacrament of Penance! In this welter of confusion today, where even “Catholics” cannot agree on what comprises the truths of faith, is it any wonder that so few manage to find their way to the truth? Readers of this will readily acknowledge that their own journey to the faith, if witnessed by one secretly drawn to it, would possibly have done more to alienate such potential converts than to attract and encourage them, what with all the running around to errant LibTrad sects and doctrinal deformity that ensued. This certainly is not the good example and practice of the Catholic faith such timid and often tortured souls need to make that final, difficult step to conversion.

Hope for the dying

If not for the following words from A Golden Key of Heaven for All Good Christian People by Rev. T. Von Den Driesch (1904), the very possibility of deathbed conversions without a priest present would be denied.

“With the grace of God, perfect contrition is attainable by all who have good will; for it is in the will, not the feeling. Perfect contrition is often confounded with a supposed greatest intensity of sorrow; but perfect contrition has degrees and stages, and it need not be the highest and the most intense, such as that of St. Peter, or St. Mary Magdalen, or St. Aloysius. A much lower degree of perfect contrition effects the forgiveness of sin. To give you confidence in your ability to make acts of perfect contrition, remember that for many thousand years before the time of our Lord, in the Old Law, perfect contrition was the only means whereby men could obtain forgiveness of sins and [prepare] to enter Heaven. Catholic soul, you have so many more graces and are better instructed. I maintain that you often have perfect contrition, without knowing it or thinking of it; for example, while making the Way of the Cross, while contemplating a crucifix or a picture of the Sacred Heart, etc. Furthermore, you can express ardent love and heartfelt sorrow in a few words, provided you have the proper intention and motive, namely the love of God: “My God and my All!”‘ My Jesus, mercy!”; “God be merciful to me, a sinner!” God has given perfect contrition the power to produce such excellent effects; therefore He desires us to excite ourselves to it and He will help us to do so. “He wills not the death of the sinner, but that he live and be converted.”

Regarding even unbaptized adults, the 1929 work by Rev. Edwin G. Kaiser, C.PP.S, Our Spiritual Service to the Sick and Dying, instructs us as follows: “Those who are not Catholic should be helped in their last moments. If they are unbaptized and are willing to believe all the Church teaches, we may and must baptize them. If it is not sure that they have been properly baptized, we baptize them conditionally. If the person is well disposed but there is reason to fear he does not want to join the Church; if mentioning the Catholic Church will only disturb him and endanger the work of saving his soul, we may proceed in this manner: recite with him the Apostles Creed, or if this is too much, ask him if he believes in Jesus who is God and came to save us by his death on the Cross. If he believes in Christ and the three Divine Persons and is ready to believe all that Christ wants him to believe in, to do all that God wants and is sorry for offending God, then we can and should baptize him. Or if we can do no more, we can at least induce him to make an act of love for Jesus.”

So deathbed repentance is still possible and may be even more common today than in the past. Is it not in accordance with God’s mercy that he would assist those who are truly sorry even at the end of their life with the necessary graces, seeing how this was already true before the loss of Mass, Sacraments and the papacy? Why send priests to prisons to absolve the worst criminals if such conversion is not a distinct possibility? Below we find the comments of the theologians on this attitude toward deathbed conversions.

Conformity in death to God’s will

“Ignorant, then, are they of human nature, and of God, who deride death-bed conversions, as though they must needs be insincere. Who knows what astounding shiftings of the personality may not, at that unique moment, and in unplumbed depths of the self, take place — nay, even, one would say, must take place in the all-but-discarnate soul, or have the chance of taking place? Foolish are they who sneer at the anxious effort of the Church, and her eager giving of the sacraments even to the seemingly unconscious, or to the hardened sinner if but there be some symptom that his will has become susceptible of their effects; or even, it may be, short of that, you may almost suppose that in the interior soul that divine mysterious recognition and embrace is happening, which by no exterior symptom can express itself.

“Here, then, you must remember that the forgiveness of sins is an article of our Creed. Here is no arbitrary condemnation in mid-life; no fatal mechanistic series; no Karma, even. There is only one complete, irreversible soul-suicide, the act of dying with the will rebellious against God’s. After all, man is limited. The soul, I said, has an appetite for the infinite; yet not infinite is the soul. It is conceivable that the soul may so pour itself out into an act of knowledge, that it can do no more; it has become its knowledge; it is its own act; time exists no more for it. So, too, it is conceivable that a soul may, as it were, exhaust itself in an act of will: it has fully expressed itself in its choice; it is that will, then; the soul may make itself what is opposed to God. That gigantic act may indeed occur; it is an evil self; it is its own worst hell.

“But this carries us beyond the juridical aspect of the problem on which these “moral” difficulties are based. From the side of man they disappear if it be recalled that man, if he finds himself “in hell,” has put himself there. No Calvinist predestination is ours. “This is the will of God, your sanctification. God wills that all men should be saved.”

“And on God’s side we have to recall that in him all is one—mercy, justice, power, love. Only our limited, inexhaustive, analyzing intellect sets these “attributes” as it were one against the other. He cannot defeat his mercy by his justice, nor justice by mercy; both are knowledge: in all he is being true to himself; his action is his self; he alone is, in the full sense, his self. No deviation from the true right is possible, on his part, without his ceasing to be God. This we know unerringly. Of the moral aspect of what we know we judge; and in human verdicts is room for almost every error. (Fr. C. C. Martindale, S.J., God and the Supernatural, 1954, Catholic Book Club.)

Deathbed conversion

“Deathbed conversion, however difficult, is still possible. Even when we see no sign of contrition, we can still not affirm that, at the last moment, just before the separation of soul from body, the soul is definitively obstinate. A sinner may be converted at that last-minute in such fashion that God alone can know it. The holy Cure of Ars, divinely enlightened, said to a weeping widow: “Your prayer, Madame, has been heard. Your husband is saved. When he threw himself into the Rhone, the Blessed Virgin obtained for him the grace of conversion just before he died. Recall how, a month before, in your garden, he plucked the most beautiful rose and said to you, ‘Carry this to the altar of the Blessed Virgin.’ She has not forgotten.”

“Other souls, too, have been converted in extremis, souls that could barely recall a few religious acts in the course of their life. A sailor, for example, preserved the practice of uncovering his head when he passed before a church. He did not know even the Our Father or the Hail Mary, but the lifting of his hat kept him from departing definitively from God.

“In the life of the saintly Bishop Bertau of Tulle, friend of Louis Veuillot, a poor girl in that city, who had once been chanter in the cathedral, fell first into misery, then into misconduct, and finally became a public sinner. She was assassinated at night, in one of the streets of Tulle. Police found her dying and carried her to a hospital. While she was dying, she cried out: “Jesus, Jesus.” Could she be granted Church burial? The Bishop answered: “Yes, because she died pronouncing the name of Jesus. But bury her early in the morning without incense.” In the room of this poor woman was found a portrait of the holy Bishop, on the back of which was written: “The best of Fathers.” Fallen though she was, she still recognized the holiness of her bishop and preserved in her heart the memory of the goodness of Our Lord.

“A certain licentious writer, Armand Sylvestre, promised his mother when she was dying to say a Hail Mary every day. He kept his promise. Out of the swamp in which he lived, he daily lifted up to God this one little flower. Pneumonia brought him to the hospital, served by religious, who said to him: “Do you wish a priest?” “Certainly,” he answered. And he received absolution, probably with sufficient attrition [imperfect contrition], through a special grace obtained for him by the Blessed Mother, though we can hardly doubt he underwent a long and heavy Purgatory.

“Another French writer, Adolphe Rette, shortly after his conversion, which was sincere and profound, was struck by a sentence he read in the visitors’ book of the Carmelite Convent: “Pray for those who will die during the Mass at which you are going to assist.” He did so. Some days later he fell grievously ill, and was confined to bed in the hospital at Beaune, for many years, up to his death. Each morning he offered all his sufferings for those who would die during the day. Thus he obtained many deathbed conversions. We shall see in Heaven how many conversions there are in the world, owing to such prayers.

“In the life of St. Catherine of Siena we read of the conversion of two great criminals. The Saint had gone to visit one of her friends. As they heard, in the street below, a loud noise, her friend looked through the window. Two condemned men were being led to execution. Their jailers were tormenting them with nails heated red-hot, while the condemned men blasphemed and cried. St. Catherine, inside the house, fell to prayer, with her arms extended in the form of a cross. At once the wicked men ceased to blaspheme and asked for a confessor. People in the street could not understand this sudden change. They did not know that a nearby Saint had obtained this double conversion.

“Several years ago the chaplain in a prison in Nancy had the reputation of converting all criminals whom he had accompanied to the guillotine. On one occasion he found himself alone, shut up with an assassin who refused to go to Confession before death. The cart, with the condemned man, passed before the sanctuary of Our Lady of Refuge. The old chaplain prayed: “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who had recourse to thy intercession was abandoned. Convert this criminal of mine: otherwise I will say that it has been heard that you have not heard.” At once the criminal was converted.

“Return to God is always possible, up to the time of death, but it becomes more and more difficult as hard-heartedness grows. Let us not put off our conversion. Let us say every day a Hail Mary for the grace of a happy death” (written by the renowned theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange in his  Life Everlasting, 1852, Herder Books, https://archive.org/details/lifeeverlasting0000garr/page/n5/mode/2up ).

Life Stories of Dying Penitents, (P. J. Kenedy, 1892), by a missionary priest is yet another example of God’s mercies, even to hardened sinners. No one is saying that all these individuals are certainly saved, or that they will be spared punishment in Purgatory. That is for God alone to determine. But no one should, as some seem to believe, discount the mercy of God at the hour of death if a sinner exhibits or has previously exhibited signs of repentance. That is Jansenism and rigorism in its most dangerous form. Let us instead every day say some prayer for the dying, that they may be spared the pains of hell and may find their way to that place of comfort, light and peace where we all long to be.