“But Catholics are hardly alone in this.”
There is the one truth-—and the very important one truth.
If evaluation (judgment)of the lives of others becomes the personalized, experiential judgment of a whole people, something has gone wrong.
Using that criteria, I can say:
*come to my Holy Hour with me and see how many people, many of them young, come to the chapel at all hours of the night to pray...many of them still in their “scrubs”, on their way home from the night shift.
*come with me to noon Mass in the business hours of my city, and see how many people take their lunch hour to come to Mass and pray. (”Could you not spend one hour with me?”)
*come with me to the Young Mother’s Group which meets every Wednesday morning—little kids in tow—for Scripture study and prayer. (”...where two or more are gathered in My Name”)
*come with me to my parish at 11 AM every morning and help distribute free food to people in need.(”I was hungry and you gave me to eat”)
*stop by my house and head off with me to visit some of the very sick and home-bound of my parish. (”I was sick and you visited me”)
*come with me and my fellow parishioners as we gather to help prepare food and flowers to help a grieving family in our parish.
*come with me to the amazing Tuesday night Scripture study led by the young father of 7 who is a refugee from Lebanon.
If the experiential, anecdotal view of who is and who isn’t living by your #1 or #2, then I ask you to take into consideration all that is unseen by many but is ever present to the Living God.
I will never understand why “accepting Christ and receiving Him as my Savior” should, in a rather knee-jerk reaction, mean belittling what one left behind....as if to infer that those we “left behind” have not “accepted and believed”. I can see no reason for me to do that to my own Protestant siblings and family members nor for them to do that with me. And we don’t do that.
So why do Catholic continually flaunt their good works as if Protestants never do any of those same things? The presumption always seems to be that just because Christians (not necessarily Protestants) believe that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, that that means that we are exempt from doing the works that God ordained that we should walk in.
So far every Catholic who appeals to those works listed does so with the implication that only Catholics do all of that and that those they are addressing don’t.
This may have escaped your attention, but there are those who do good works like that who don’t trumpet it from the street corner. The same Jesus who said that we should feed the hungry and clothe the poor, also said not to do our works of righteousness to be seen and lauded by men.
The assumption and accusation that just because we don’t talk about the works we do or that we don’t believe that they are required for salvation, means we don’t do them is disingenuous.