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Notes -
I have not come across that hadith before, interestingly, but I have come across, in my experience, Islam having very strong taboos against making assumptions about other people. Barring the most extreme circumstances, it is not for you to judge another person non-Muslim, because you cannot see into their heart. It is not for you to ever say that so-and-so is going to heaven and so-and-so is going to hell, because you cannot know the condition of their soul, and their final fate rests in God's hands only.
This is one of the places where Islam is, I would hazard, closer to Protestantism than it is to Catholicism. There are some places it seems to have more kinship with Catholicism (the emphasis on law, community practice, etc.), but it shares with many strains of Protestantism a deep reticence to make definitive judgements about matters that properly belong to God.
It's not that judgements can never be made. There is a procedure for declaring someone takfir. But it is truly the nuclear option and there is, traditionally at least, an extreme reluctance to use it. (Some more radical groups in the 20th century have gotten more willing to; I take that as a negative development.)
This is the official stance of Catholics as well. We know all people are saved through the Catholic Church, but we cannot judge if someone isn't a mystical member of the Catholic Church or not. We can tell you what makes up the matter of a grave sin, but we cannot tell you if any individual person has actually committed that sin which requires full knowledge and their own volition. We do not affirm that any specific person is in Hell or damned.
You do, however, affirm that specific people are saved. Canonisation, for instance, involves making the formal judgement that the person canonised is in Heaven.
In this world, at least, I think Catholicism tends to be more confident than Protestantism in making clear pronouncements about whether a person is currently in a state of grace or a state of sin. The sacramental economy is visible in Catholicism, whereas I think Protestants tend to emphasise the invisible church more.
Catholics have 0 confidence that any given person is in a state of mortal sin. I see people ask priests all the time if something was a mortal sin and they say something like, "that is grave matter but I cannot tell you if you committed a mortal sin. You need to tell me, what did you know at the time? Was there any cohersion, were you in a good state of mind..."
I think Catholics are very confident in their ability to guide people in examining their own consciences, but not in their ability to judge others.
And case in point with Saints, we don't cannonize saints on the strenth of how they appear on the outside but only after a confirmation from God in the form of an attributes miracle.
You've inserted the word 'mortal' there. Mortal sin, in Catholic theology, has three elements - it must concern a grave matter, it must be committed with full knowledge, and it must be committed with deliberate consent.
The grave matter can be determined objectively and externally. Knowledge and consent are where grey areas emerge, and is it is technically impossible to fully see into someone else's head, we thus cannot determine mortal sin with total reliability. Knowledge is the easier fork; for many mortal sins, e.g. murder, it is practically inconceivable that the sinner not know that the act is wrong. Consent is the trickiest, because consent can be made somewhat less than full by passions, addictions, mental disorders, or any other frailty. It is impossible to fully rule out the possibility of some such frailty.
This is thus the usual justification for hope in the situation of people who've committed suicide. Suicide is in theory a mortal sin - it concerns a grave matter, as it is murder, most Catholics can be reliably assumed to know why self-murder is wrong, and since suicide involves making a choice to kill yourself, consent seems pretty easy to observe. That was why for a while the standard line was that all suicide victims go straight to Hell. Nowadays, however, I think the line is that suicide in itself suggests that there was some sort of mitigating factor like a mental disorder.
In any case, I did not say mortal sin. I think the terminology appropriate to what I'm saying would be 'grave sin', which only requires the first of the three points of the mortal sin trident. Dying with unrepented grave sin does not necessarily mean you are damned, but grave sin is discernible from the outside, and Catholicism has various procedures for identifying and repenting of grave sin, and participation in various rites of the church (most notably the Eucharist) is contingent upon doing so.
Thus, for instance, Catholics do stress sometimes about who is or is not permitted to partake of communion, whereas in my experience the Protestant line is usually "examine your own conscience, and then decide" (cf. 1 Cor 11:28).
I think in Catholicism there is a kind of external economy of grace that the believer participates in. The Catholic Church is much more willing to list and define the parts of this economy, and state their implications for one's eternal welfare - in that sense I'd argue that Catholicism is, intentionally, a more legible religion than Protestantism. There are senses in which I'd say that Judaism and Islam are both even more legible than Catholicism, though I think it depends on the issue a little. Thus in this case, with both Muslims and Protestants being, I think, more reluctant to make definite statements about the saved than Catholics. Catholics don't make pronouncements recklessly or willy-nilly, but as you say, there are circumstances where they will definitively say that such-and-such is in Heaven.
Generally speaking you are correct in the specific points you make, but I think you're not really contradicting me in terms of the big picture.
Because you contrasted "State of Grace" vs "State of Sin." A person who has committed a venial sin is still in the state of grace. To contrast the State of Grace with a State of Sin I have to add the word "mortal" in there.
Catholic laity sometimes bay for this politician or that celebrity to be refused communion because of what looks like a public sin. You will note that these calls are almost never answered by the leadership. Even excommunication is not The End - a few people who were excommunicated are officially recognized saints!
Are you telling me that Protestants don't believe they can even tell what constitutes a sin or not, even when examining their own consciences?
I admit what was going through my mind when I wrote that, as a mental example of a good Protestant response to that question, was Joan of Arc's answer to the question of whether she was in a state of grace - if I am not, may God put me there; if I am, may God so keep me. Since that we cannot ourselves know whether we are, we should try to adopt the attitude that Joan did. In a sense it does not matter, because our obligation to always continue to put our trust in God and turn back to him is unchanged.
In any case, I'm certainly not saying that Protestants don't know what sins are. What I'm saying is that I think for Catholics the economy of grace is considered somewhat more visible than it is for Protestants. This is not about whether or not such-and-such thing is sinful, but rather about, with our limited human self-knowledge, estimating our own places in the larger economy of salvation.
From my perspective, the biggest difference is Catholics have the Sacrament of Reconciliation, which provides definitive ways to know a sin has been forgiven. Whereas Protestants have to hope they've been forgiven, and that ambiguity doesn't seem like a positive to me.
But to a Catholic, knowing that a specific sin has been forgiven does not equate to knowledege that one has sanctifying grace. Instead:
“Since it belongs to the supernatural order, grace escapes our experience and cannot be known except by faith. We cannot therefore rely on our feelings or our works to conclude that we are justified and saved” (CCC 2005).
“no one can know with a certainty of faith, which cannot be subject to mistake, that he has obtained the grace of God” (The Council of Trent, Session 6, Chapter IX).
We can have very good reason to believe we are in a state of grace, and this belief is a requirement to receive communion worthily. We can't know we are with unmistakable divine faith. We can be mistaken about it.
Well, from my Protestant perspective, I do think that the sacrament of penance and reconciliation is unnecessary, but I would say that's because it's got a mistaken ecclesiology. Mutual confession and forgiveness is, of course, essential to the Christian life and to any Christian community, but I think the sacrament of penance institutionalises that in a way that is unnecessary.
If you'll pardon a personal story, I've flirted with conversion to Catholicism a few times, and something I found very odd, psychologically, was the idea that I should be recording or making some sort of mental list of my sins for purposes of confession. I think that often I am not conscious of my sins, or I do not recognise sins even in the process of committing them, or that both my motives and my actions are mixed, combining sin and righteousness in ways beyond my ability to extricate. There are some unambiguous sins - I know if I have stolen, or murdered, or committed adultery! - but those are very much the minority. Thus when I confess my sins, both in a church context and privately to God, I name (or bring to mind) specific sins that I feel guilt for, but I am also conscious that those are only the tip of the iceberg. I ask God to purify and transfigure my mixed motives, to make me aware of the sins I have not recognised, to correct and chasten my wayward heart toward those sins that I struggle to regret, and so on. I find the - pardon my language - mechanical nature of the sacrament of penance and reconciliation to be an obstacle to this holistic view of sin.
I don't think that, in general, I am in a state of grace right up until I impair it with a grave sin, which I think need a priest to absolve. It doesn't seem that binary to me. I think that I am constantly in a process of metanoia - I pray that God, through his grace, is mysteriously at work in me healing and transforming my sinful nature.
Naturally I don't expect a Catholic to agree with me. In principle I have no objection to a person making a confession to a priest or minister, and that priest or minister offering absolution. In fact I have no objection to a person doing that to another layperson. It is salutary in each case. So I don't think a Catholic is doing himself or herself spiritual harm by going to confession.
But I do think that the visible economy you get in Catholicism, the ledger of sins accumulated and absolved that I felt I was asked to start recording, is not the right way for Christians to think about sin, reconciliation, and grace.
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