📖Overview

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to His call to become children of God, adoptive sons and daughters, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life. Grace is a participation in the life of God Himself. It introduces us into the intimacy of Trinitarian life. The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of His own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our souls to heal them of sin and to sanctify them. Sanctifying grace (also called habitual grace) is a stable and supernatural disposition that perfects the soul itself to enable it to live with God and to act by His love. Actual graces refer to God's interventions, whether at the beginning of conversion or in the course of the work of sanctification. Sacramental graces are the gifts proper to the different sacraments. The grace of the Holy Spirit has the power to justify us, that is, to cleanse us from our sins and to communicate to us the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ and through Baptism. Justification involves the remission of sins, sanctification, and the renewal of the inner person. It is the most excellent work of God's love, merited for us by the Passion of Christ. Human merit before God in the Christian life arises from the fact that God has freely chosen to associate man with the work of His grace. The initiative belongs to God; no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification.

💡Key Points