Justification by Faith and Works

DEFENSE

The Church doesn’t use “by faith and works” as an overall summary of how we are justified.

It’s not to be denied that some individual Catholics do this, but that’s not the same thing as the Magisterium of the Church doing it:

• The Church’s most authoritative and key historical document on justification is the Council of Trent’s Decree on Justification, and the phrase “justified by faith and works” never appears in it.
• The Church’s most important and authoritative presentation of the faith as a whole is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the relevant phrase doesn’t appear in it either.
• The Church’s most important and detailed contemporary discussion of justification is the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, together with the Church’s official response and the annex (all available online), and the phrase appears in none of these.
• The phrase appears nowhere on the Vatican website (Vatican.va).That the Church does not use the phrase “justified by faith and works” is indication that the discussion has been misframed by both individual Catholics and individual Protestants. The reported phrases simply aren’t used in the Church’s official documents.

  So what does the Church say? How does it handle the famous passage saying “man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24)? It’s dealt with in chapter 10 of Trent’s Decree on Justification, which discusses the increase in righteousness Christians experience after their initial justification. According to Trent, after we first come to God and are forgiven, we continue to grow in righteousness (justification) by cooperating with God’s grace and performing good works (Eph. 2:10). It’s with respect to this ongoing justification that the Church holds good

  works have a role to play (see also Days 312 and 354).
  With respect to initial justification, “none of those things that precede justification, whether faith or works, merit the grace of justification” (Decree on Justification 8). Good works therefore flow from, but

  do not cause, our initial justification.
  It’s misleading for Catholics to say we’re justified by “faith and

  works,” because to Protestant ears this will mean we need good works to be forgiven, which we don’t.