Welcome Jesus before that it be too late
Yes, God wants all men to be saved, but saved during the life he gives them here on earth, because there is no other. After this life comes eternity, eternal life. I repeat this because even priests find it hard to accept: there is no third life between time and eternity in which we can still secure our salvation. As God teaches through the mouth of Saint Paul: At the acceptable time I heard you; on the day of salvation I helped you. Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation. Now, not tomorrow. That is why the Apostle says: Work out your salvation with fear and trembling. Why work out your salvation with fear and trembling, if you can still do it in death, once you are free from the cares and temptations of this world?
A polemicist but not a theologian, Father Pagès repeats the error of the moralists: nothing would happen in the Hereafter because one cannot “change one’s mind” there or “earn one’s salvation”: this crude position confuses what happens to those who have already encountered Christ and have either accepted or rejected him with what happens to others—that is, to those who have not yet had the opportunity to take a stand for or against Jesus. These moralists, who reduce life to earning merit (“working out one’s salvation”), do not know what it means to encounter Christ.
Worse still: they fail to understand that their neo-scholastic moralism leads to the relativism of the “theology of religions” (all religions lead to God).
Indeed, if God grants graces of salvation here and there, based on people’s merit (this applies to non-Christians, since Christians already have baptism), this leads either to predestination or to the belief that merit is universal (for who deserves heaven on their own, if not everyone?).
Karl Rahner, who called himself a Thomist (though no one asked him to…), studied the “conditions of possibility” for faith and salvation, and concluded that they are universal: the non-Christian is a Christian who is unaware of it, an anonymous Christian, and the Christian is someone who knows that he or she is a Christian. “We’ll all go to Paradise,” sang Michel Polnareff in the 1960s.
This view, which is widely held today, makes more sense than the previous one, which makes salvation dependent on merit. For then, moralists are forced to declare that children under the age of 7 cannot “earn” salvation and that, if they die without being baptized, they go to a special place in the afterlife: Limbo—neither Heaven nor Hell! Benedict XVI has completely distanced himself from this Western doctrine, which is not truly traditional but has been around for centuries...