Theology · Grace

What Is Merit, and Can Catholics Earn Heaven?

The Accusation

One of the oldest Protestant objections to Catholicism is that Catholics believe they can earn their way to heaven. Good works, prayers, fasting and sacraments are seen as attempts to put God in our debt.

The Catholic Church does teach that good works can be meritorious. The Council of Trent, in 1547, defined that the good works of a justified person truly merit an increase of grace and eternal life. So the accusation is not simply a misunderstanding of words.

But the Church’s understanding of merit is very different from the picture behind the accusation. Once it is understood, it turns out to be one of the clearest expressions of how completely salvation depends on grace.

What Merit Is Not

Start with what the Church rules out.

We cannot merit the first grace. No one can earn their conversion or justification. The Catechism is emphatic: “No one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification, at the beginning of conversion” (CCC 2010). Trent taught the same. Everything begins with God’s free gift. This is why Catholics, like Protestants, reject Pelagianism, the fifth-century heresy that we can reach God by our own natural efforts.

God owes us nothing by nature. The Catechism states plainly that “with regard to God, there is no strict right to any merit on the part of man,” because of the infinite distance between Creator and creature (CCC 2007). We cannot put God in our debt.

Merit is not a commercial transaction. God is not a shopkeeper totting up our purchases. The language of “earning” heaven, in the sense of a wage that compels payment, is foreign to Catholic teaching.

What Merit Is

If none of that is true, what does the Church mean?

The Catechism defines merit as “the recompense owed by a community or a society for the action of one of its members” (CCC 2006). In the Christian life, the “community” is the family of God. The point is that God has freely chosen to associate us with His work, and to reward what we do in union with Him.

The key word is freely chosen. Merit exists only because God has decided that it should. In the Catechism’s words, merit is due “in the first place to the grace of God,” and in the second place to our free cooperation (CCC 2008). Our merit depends on what the Church calls God’s “free ordination”: He has promised to reward the good works done in His grace, and He keeps His promises.

St Augustine put it perfectly in a line the Church has repeated ever since: when God crowns our merits, He is crowning His own gifts (CCC 2009).

Why Grace and Merit Belong Together

At first sight, merit seems to compete with grace. If the reward is a gift, how can it be deserved? If it is deserved, how can it be a gift?

The answer lies in what grace does. Grace is not simply God doing things instead of us. It is God enabling us to act, freely and really, as His children. When a person in a state of grace does a good work, two things are true at once: God is the source of the work, and the person truly does it.

A father helps his young son build a model. The father provides the materials, guides the boy’s hands, and keeps him from giving up. When the model is finished, the father praises the boy, and the praise is genuine, because the boy really did build it. But the boy owes everything to his father.

Merit is like that. It honours both God’s initiative and our genuine freedom. To deny merit altogether would be to deny that grace really transforms us into people capable of acting in love.

What Can Be Merited

Catholic theology distinguishes two kinds of merit.

Condign merit (from the Latin for “worthy”) is merit in the proper sense. It applies to a person in a state of grace, whose good works are done in charity. By God’s promise, such works merit an increase of grace and eternal life (CCC 2010). Scripture speaks this way: “the Son of Man… will repay every man for what he has done” (Matthew 16:27); “henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me” (2 Timothy 4:8).

Congruous merit (from the Latin for “fitting”) is merit in a looser sense. It describes what God may fittingly grant in response to prayer and good works, without having strictly promised it. In this way we can obtain graces for others: a mother praying for her son’s conversion, for example. The Catechism says we can merit “for ourselves and for others” the graces needed for sanctification, and even temporal goods like health and friendship, “in accordance with God’s wisdom” (CCC 2010).

One thing cannot be merited at all: final perseverance, the grace of dying in God’s friendship. Trent called it a “great gift.” We must pray for it constantly, but we cannot claim it as a right.

The Root of Merit Is Love

What makes a work meritorious is not its size or difficulty, but charity. The Catechism says that “charity is the principal source of merit in us before God” (CCC 2011). A small act done out of love for God is worth more than a heroic act done for self-glory.

This also means merit can be lost. Mortal sin destroys charity and grace, and with them the merit of past works. Many theologians hold, though it is not defined, that when a person repents and returns to grace, their past merits revive. Either way, the Christian life is not a bank account to be filled, but a relationship to be lived.

Empty Hands

The Catechism ends its section on merit with the words of St Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower:

After earth’s exile, I hope to go and enjoy you in the fatherland, but I do not want to lay up merits for heaven. I want to work for your love alone… In the evening of this life, I shall appear before you with empty hands, for I do not ask you, Lord, to count my works. All our justice is blemished in your eyes. I wish, then, to be clothed in your own justice and to receive from your love the eternal possession of yourself. (CCC 2011)

Thérèse, a Doctor of the Church, did not reject the doctrine of merit. She expressed its true spirit. The saints do good works not to buy heaven but because they love God, and they trust Him to crown His own gifts.

Common Ground

In 1999, the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. Both sides affirmed that “by grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God.” They also agreed that good works follow justification and that God promises them a reward.

Real differences remain, but the declaration showed that the old caricature, Catholics earning heaven and Protestants despising good works, does justice to neither side.