I was talking to a Protestant friend recently about how he was “still on the hunt for a Protestant liturgical church,” when I responded, half-tongue-in-cheek, that he should perhaps give contemporary Catholicism and the current Roman rite a fair shake and may find the “liturgical Protestantism” he’s looking for.

He said, “NEVER!” — because the Council of Trent’s decrees and canons on Justification are a deal-breaker for him that “outlaw the Gospel” of free grace through faith.

It’s a common stumbling block for convinced Protestants, and understandably so. Truth be told, I have never been interested at all in the theological fineries of the justification-debate, and (not currently suffering from insomnia) that is not about to change. I’ve tried to look at these issues from the perspective of prima-facie common sense explanations and analogies, as these are the most helpful for me.

Take marriage. What makes me a married man? Obviously, it’s the fact that I had a wedding day, exchanged vows in front of witnesses, etc. Was I a husband the day after my wedding? Yes.

Am I any more of a husband today than I was then, years ago?

No… and yes. I think common sense clearly indicates that on the one hand a husband is a husband is a husband. But on the other hand, one can still be “more” or “less” of a husband, conditioned by his actions, history, virtues, vices, etc. A pattern of conformity to your vocation does, in fact, make you more of that which you are called to be and are.

The Reformers were anxious to defend the first part of this: justification is like marriage, and in an important sense, you’re not any more or less the divine Bridegroom’s based on subsequent actions, any more than having a better or a worse day in a marriage would somehow make the marriage not exist and then exist again. Fair enough. But the Catholic teaching of Trent concedes all of this.

What Trent also does is protect the other key side of this equation:

“If anyone saith, that the justice received is not preserved and also increased before God through good works; but that the said works are merely the fruits and signs of Justification obtained, but not a cause of the increase thereof; let him be anathema.”

(Council of Trent, Sixth Session, Canon 24 on Justification)

If Justification is to be a lived reality in any way rather than a mental abstraction, this simply makes sense. A husband is a husband on his wedding day. At the same time, it’s simply reasonable to say that his marriage—his “husbandliness”—is “preserved and also increased” through acts that are ordered to his married vocation. No one would bat an eye in saying a good and faithful husband is “more” of a husband than a lying, cheating deadbeat loser.

Or think of the military: a graduate of basic training is no less a soldier than a general with four decades of multi-theater combat experience. Yet in an equally real way, the latter is far more of a soldier.

All this to say: in my mind, all Trent did was, on the one hand, uphold the gratuity of grace in good Augustinian fashion and speak of the “gratuitous justification of the sinner by faith,” while necessarily recognizing that like in any other sphere of life, whether personal or professional, you can’t build a hermetic seal between your recognized status as something (husband, soldier, Christian), and the degrees of your life’s conformity to that formal status, which—pray God—can increase no less than the proverbial talents God has given us to multiply.