Visions
If God granted St. Paul a vision on the road to Damascus that turned a violent persecutor of Christians into the greatest apostle, and granted St. Alphonse Ratisbonne, a Jewish man openly hostile to Catholicism, a vision of the Blessed Virgin in the Church of Sant'Andrea delle Fratte that instantly converted him, why does God not grant every person a vision of this same kind upon reaching the age of reason?
Such a vision would not override free will, the freedom of Paul and Ratisbonne to respond was preserved, and both still had to live out their faith through suffering, doubt, and decades of ordinary struggle. Nor would it reduce faith to mere knowledge, since the demons believe and tremble, and countless witnesses of Christ's own miracles still rejected him. It would simply remove the one obstacle that condemns so many sincere souls: the inability, through no fault of their own, to know that the Catholic faith is true.
Why are Paul and Ratisbonne worthy of such a grace, but the child in a Hindu village, the atheist philosopher genuinely searching for truth, the Muslim convinced from birth of Islam's truth, and the ordinary baptized Catholic who quietly loses faith in university, are not? If God desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4), and if he possesses the means to grant that knowledge directly, as he has demonstrably done before, why does he withhold it from almost everyone?