There are some outside the Church who feel and believe that the Catholic Church is the true Church, and yet they do not become Catholics, because there are so many difficulties in the way.  For example, they have been brought up in another religion, and all their friends, relatives, or associates are opposed to the Catholic religion.  Their business, their social life, their worldly interests will all suffer if they become Catholics.  So, although they feel they should at once embrace the true religion, they keep putting off till death comes and finds them outside the Church—­and most probably guilty of other mortal sins.  Such persons cannot be saved, for they reject all the graces God bestows upon them.  A very common fault with such people is to excuse this conduct by saying:  Oh!  I was brought up in the Protestant religion, and everyone ought to live in the religion in which he was brought up.  Let me ask:  If persons were brought up with some bodily deformity that their parents neglected to have remedied while they were young, would they not use every means themselves to have the deformity removed as soon as they became old enough to see and understand their misfortune?  In like manner, if unfortunately parents bring up their children in a false religion—­that is, with spiritual deformities, it is the duty of the children to embrace the true religion as soon as they know it.  Again persons will say:  Oh, I believe one religion as good as another; we are all Christians, and all trying to serve God.  If one religion is as good as another, why did not Our Lord allow the old religions—­false or true—­to remain?  If one man says a thing is black and another says it is white, they cannot both be right, for a thing cannot be black and white at the same time.  Only one can be right; and, if we are anxious about the color of the object, we must try to find which one is right.  Just in the same way all the religions that claim to be Christian contradict one another; one says a thing is false and another says it is true:  one says Our Lord taught so and so and another says He did not.  Now since it is very important for us to know which is right, we must find out which is really the Church Our Lord established; and when we have found it we will know that all the other pretended Christian religions must be false.  Our Lord has given us marks by which we can know His Church, as we saw while speaking of the marks of the Church; and the Roman Catholic Church is the only Church that has all these marks.  We say that we are Roman Catholics to show that we are in communion with the Church of Rome, established by St. Peter, the chief of the Apostles.

325 Q. Can they who fail to profess their faith in the true Church in which they believe expect to be saved while in that state?  A. They who fail to profess their faith in the true Church in which they believe cannot expect to be saved while in that state, for Christ has said:  “Whoever shall deny Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in Heaven.”