Logically, everything is given to us and is a manifestation of grace. So how could merits be as good? My native actions are also the action of grace as well. Nothing I have just stated is against Catholic teaching. Augustine was right to reject Pelagius. But when he rejected him, he did not affirm the direct opposite of what Pelagius said. He affirmed a teaching which included a real freedom.
Hence, that which invites our return to God— evidently belongs to our will; while the other, which promises His return to us, belongs to His grace. (Augustine, On grace and free will, V.)
He did not say freedom was something unreal. He read scripture too, which said, "God will repay each person according to what they have done.--Rom 2:6.
The nature of freedom is that it is a real operation of my native powers. Those powers are a gift from God, but by their nature they are really freely capable of effects apart from God. But because freedom is also a gift from God, it is a grace, and can not be said to "be as good as grace." Thus Merit is not considered the same way as Pelagius would consider it. Merit is itself a manifestation of God's grace
Catholic teaching has always insisted, along with Augustine, that the will must cooperate with grace. Because that is acting according to the design of freedom. The acceptance of God includes the reality of this real principle of freedom. Freedom is a gift from God, but it is a gift in which the concept of real love is possible.
So, to claim a conflict of grace against merit in Catholic teaching would be incorrect.
“Hence, that which invites our return to God— evidently belongs to our will; while the other, which promises His return to us, belongs to His grace. (Augustine, On grace and free will, V.)
He did not say freedom was something unreal. He read scripture too, which said, “God will repay each person according to what they have done.—Rom 2:6”
Neither Augustine nor Reformed doctrine actually does away with the will. It simply asserts that the unwilling are made willing by God’s grace effectually, that free-will is a voluntary slave to sin, and that it is by effectual grace that we are saved.
Hence Augustine says,
“But this part of the human race to which God has promised pardon and a share in His eternal kingdom, can they be restored through the merit of their own works? God forbid. For what good work can a lost man perform, except so far as he has been delivered from perdition? Can they do anything by the free determination of their own will? Again I say, God forbid. For it was by the evil use of his free-will that man destroyed both it and himself. For, as a man who kills himself must, of course, be alive when he kills himself, but after he has killed himself ceases to live, and cannot restore himself to life; so, when man by his own free-will sinned, then sin being victorious over him, the freedom of his will was lost. For of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage. This is the judgment of the Apostle Peter. And as it is certainly true, what kind of liberty, I ask, can the bond-slave possess, except when it pleases him to sin? For he is freely in bondage who does with pleasure the will of his master. Accordingly, he who is the servant of sin is free to sin. And hence he will not be free to do right, until, being freed from sin, he shall begin to be the servant of righteousness. And this is true liberty, for he has pleasure in the righteous deed; and it is at the same time a holy bondage, for he is obedient to the will of God. But whence comes this liberty to do right to the man who is in bondage and sold under sin, except he be redeemed by Him who has said, If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed? And before this redemption is wrought in a man, when he is not yet free to do what is right, how can he talk of the freedom of his will and his good works, except he be inflated by that foolish pride of boasting which the apostle restrains when he says, By grace are you saved, through faith.” (Augustine, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love, Ch. 30)
Catholic doctrine certainly does not speak of grace in terms of being effectual, working to effectually make a man humble and obedient, and not maintained by the humility and obedience of the man in cooperation of it.
Thus the Reformed/Augustinian view is utterly contrary to the Catholic position, which rather sees grace as something to be merited through obedience to the RCC.