Salvation is NOT by faith alone!

I converted to Catholicism because I no longer believed that my salvation could be secured by "faith alone."

Instead, I had to accomplish an actual work - by my own free will - to cooperate with God's mercy and grace that were given to me, in order to not continue a dreadful pattern of wrecking His salvation with my habitual sins.

Specifically, I had to stop masturbating. The only way I could do this was by physical mortification - sleeping on the floor, which I do to this day (with some lapses).

This is the paradox of authentic Christian salvation: it is truly God alone Who saves, but He cannot do it without our cooperation. In my experience, faith is not merely an assent to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, but it entails an important "work" on our part - namely, genuine sorrow for and repentance from sin. We all have to reach a point where we would rather die than commit the same grave sin again, and thus resolve to do everything in our God-given power to avoid such sin or even its near occasion.

This is serious, serious hard work: it's not as simple as making a personal resolution. It requires radical measures: I mean things like cutting off your Internet access for 6 months so you won't look at pornography again.

Now, of course, we should never confuse the means with the end. Some people won't have to sleep on the floor, or cut off their Internet for a while, in order to come to the same place: a deep loathing of one's sexual impurity. But the underlying basis for every path of deliverance from sin is the same: it must fully involve one's free will in the pursuit of a holy hatred for the filth that is sin and, on its flip side, a holy flame of love for the beauty of sanctity.

How, then, can be we sure (or more sure) that we have truly been saved? Only when not even a hint of adultery, fornication, or any kind of sexual deviance, no matter how seemingly trivial, can ever hold any sway over our souls for more than a few tense moments.

Because once in Heaven, we will see chastity and unchastity plainly for what they really are: the former a glowing young virgin of indescribable pulchritude and fragrance, the latter a horrid-looking, putrid old witch.

Christ is Mary concealed, Mary is Christ revealed

Today is the feast day of my patron, St. Alphonsus Maria Liguori (1696-1787), Doctor of the Church and renowned moral theologian and Mariologist. This after the yesterday's (July 31) memorial of another great saint, St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuits.

Both had a great love for the Virgin Mary, as all Catholics should aspire to.

The glory of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is this: that Almighty God took the form of human flesh and blood through a young virgin, and just as He first entered His creation through this virgin, so He also decided to channel all of His mercy and grace to the human race through this virgin, and very deliberately kept her hidden from her own beneficiaries!

Mary is the most exalted of all creatures, because it is exclusively through her that the eternal mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is unveiled to the Host of Heaven.

Christ is Mary concealed, Mary is Christ revealed.

Everything that any sincere soul comes to know about Christ will inexorably point that soul to the conclusion that He is a Savior of boundless mercy, whose compassion always overrules His anger. And, any and every personal experience of this unfathomable Divine Mercy of Jesus is a most sublime invitation to get to know the wellspring of tenderness from whose form He received His own - Mary.

The blessed soul who takes Mary for her mother and comes to know her will then find that she is a sheer abyss - a sea, or "Maria", as she is so fittingly named in the Latin tongues - of adoring contemplation of the two holiest mysteries of Christ's redemption, namely the Incarnation and the Passion. This is the pearl of greatest price! For the aim of the Christian life is, in the words of St. Paul, "to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified." Mary is both the gateway to this magnificent discovery and the discovery in itself!

She is so completely and perfectly united with her Divine Son that, even though few Christians are aware of it in this life, in Heaven the fullness of revelation will be none other than the fact that she is both the source and summit of our glorification, because that glorification is precisely our mystical bond to the Body and Blood of her Son - the fruit of her womb.