With the blessing of His Holiness Patriarch Alexy of Moscow and All Rus' Holiness... A state of the human soul that seems something distant and unattainable. And at the same time, the desire for holiness is a normal way of life for a Christian. How to achieve holiness? How to find salvation? Virtually all of the patristic works are devoted to the answers to these questions - after all, it is the acquisition of salvation and the achievement of the Kingdom of Heaven that is the goal of human existence. And the Orthodox Church, using the example of its saints, offers us a path along which we can achieve the Kingdom of Heaven bequeathed to us by the Savior. In recent years, the voices of foreign preachers and missionaries have been heard more and more often, offering us their path of salvation. Among them, the most significant is the sermon of representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, which, unlike the “newborn” sects, has a centuries-old history. The author of these lines, observing the ever-increasing scale of proselytism of Catholics in Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union, decided to explore the question: how is salvation understood in Catholicism - and not from a dogmatic point of view, but from a practical side. What means does the Catholic Church offer to achieve salvation? How does a person use these tools? How is “holiness” understood from the point of view of the Catholic Church? How comparable are the images of an Orthodox saint and a Catholic saint? This work is an attempt to answer these questions, which, I hope, will be able to confirm some doubting hearts in Orthodoxy, and for others will be of assistance in matters of polemics and apologetics. © Deacon Alexy Bekoryukov, 2001© Editorial, layout - Sretensky Monastery, 2001© Artist - S. Popov, 2001 Source: