Of course, most Catholics are not following Jesus particularly well (myself included). And indeed, when people point to vengeful Catholics, or lying Catholics, or greedy Catholics, or what-have-you, it is generally not hard to show that vengeance, lying, greed, etc. are in pretty direct conflict to the words of Jesus in the Gospels, and to the basic teachings of the Church. (Cf. the Seven Deadly Sins).
Regarding vengeance and related sins of anger in particular, there are, of
course, those places in the Gospels that discuss hell. But in general, Jesus seems to draw a pretty
direct line between hell and a lack of charity; so—whatever you make of hell
doctrinally—it would be difficult to argue that a reasonable interpretation of
Jesus’s remarks on hell could form grounds for our treating each other worse.
(Of course, there have been unreasonable interpretations that did precisely that. I’m not appealing to the idea that Christians has never gotten anger, etc., wrong; rather, I’m appealing to a reader who doubts my “reasonable interpretation” metric to just go read the source texts and explain to me how taken as a whole, the Gospels support anger, vengeance, and the like.)
But in fact, this seeming defense of Christian doctrine has actually exacerbated the original problem. For if sins of (say) anger are not only against nature/intuition/enlightened-best-interest but also against the basic tenets of Christianity, then it is even harder to explain—given the doctrine of grace with which this series of posts began—how Christians can so often violate these tenets. If God says “Be angry, but sin not” and also gives Christians the grace not to sin, why do so many sin anyway?
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