“Why would I bother reading or hearing about people who have no perseverance in the faith? If they cannot be faithful, what benefit, to me, can come from following their unfaithfulness?”
To encourage you to be unfaithful to the Roman Catholic Church, of course. What truth is there in a religion that denies that perseverance is the gift of God, and not from your own native merit? Such a religion has certainly lost all claims to being the church of God, much like the Jews who gloried in their succession lost it at their apostasy.
“All our good merits are only wrought in us by grace, and -when God crowns our merits, he crowns nothing but his own gifts. (Augustine, Letter 194)
“Have just men, then, no merits? Certainly they have, because they are righteous. But they were not made righteous by merits. For they are made righteous when they are justified, but as the apostle says, they are justified freely by his grace.” (Ibid)
“I assert, therefore, that the perseverance by which we persevere in Christ even to the end is the gift of God; and I call that the end by which is finished that life wherein alone there is peril of falling.” (Augustine, On the Perseverance of the Saints)
“But of such as these [the Elect] none perishes, because of all that the Father has given Him, He will lose none. John 6:39 Whoever, therefore, is of these does not perish at all; nor was any who perishes ever of these. For which reason it is said, They went out from among us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would certainly have continued with us. John 2:19”. (Augustine, Treatise on the Predestination of the Saints)
“For who makes thee to differ, and what has thou that thou hast not received?” (1 Cor. iv. 7). Our merits therefore do not cause us to differ, but grace. For if it be merit, it is a debt; and if it be a debt, it is not gratuitous; and if it be not gratuitous, it is not grace. (Augustine, Sermon 293)
“To encourage you to be unfaithful to the Roman Catholic Church, of course.”
There ya go. Apostacy personified. Very sad.
Logically, everything is given to us and is a manifestation of grace. So how could merits be as good? My native actions are also the action of grace as well. Nothing I have just stated is against Catholic teaching. Augustine was right to reject Pelagius. But when he rejected him, he did not affirm the direct opposite of what Pelagius said. He affirmed a teaching which included a real freedom.
Hence, that which invites our return to God— evidently belongs to our will; while the other, which promises His return to us, belongs to His grace. (Augustine, On grace and free will, V.)
He did not say freedom was something unreal. He read scripture too, which said, "God will repay each person according to what they have done.--Rom 2:6.
The nature of freedom is that it is a real operation of my native powers. Those powers are a gift from God, but by their nature they are really freely capable of effects apart from God. But because freedom is also a gift from God, it is a grace, and can not be said to "be as good as grace." Thus Merit is not considered the same way as Pelagius would consider it. Merit is itself a manifestation of God's grace
Catholic teaching has always insisted, along with Augustine, that the will must cooperate with grace. Because that is acting according to the design of freedom. The acceptance of God includes the reality of this real principle of freedom. Freedom is a gift from God, but it is a gift in which the concept of real love is possible.
So, to claim a conflict of grace against merit in Catholic teaching would be incorrect.