Yes — fully, as a matter of defined doctrine. There is a widespread impression that theosis, the deification of the human person, is the jewel of Eastern Christianity, while the West has only a courtroom: guilt, satisfaction, and a verdict of “not guilty.” As a claim about the defined doctrine, that is simply false. Deification is the common patristic faith, and the Latin Church holds it in full.

First, honor the Eastern emphasis, because it is real. For the Christian East, theosis is the very goal of salvation: not first a legal acquittal but a true, transforming participation in the life of God — to become by grace what God is by nature. The slogan that frames the whole economy is St. Athanasius’: “the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” The East kept this horizon continuously in view, and gave it a precise metaphysics in the essence–energies distinction. Sharper still, some in the East press a metaphysical charge: that Western divine simplicity may leave grace a created thing, so that Latin “deification” cannot quite mean what the East means — a real question we take up in the essence–energies FAQ. And they rightly worry that Western piety, after centuries of arguing about justification, let the deifying horizon fade.

But the receipts are Latin too. St. Augustine — the West’s own Doctor — teaches deification (deificatio) by name: God “called men gods, that are deified of His Grace, not born of His Substance… He that justifies does Himself deify.” The very act the East fears is merely juridical, Augustine fuses with divinization. St. Irenaeus gave the form Athanasius would echo: Christ “became what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.” St. Thomas Aquinas defines grace itself as “nothing short of a partaking of the Divine Nature,” and in the Office of Corpus Christi says the Son “assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.” And the Catechism gathers Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Aquinas into one paragraph (§460), teaching theosis in the Fathers’ own words. Its root is 2 Peter 1:4 — we are made “partakers of the divine nature” — and its conciliar form is Vatican II’s universal call to holiness: deification is the vocation of every baptized person, not a monastic specialty.

Here is the honest part, conceded plainly. The popular West really did drift. After Anselm’s satisfaction theory and the Reformation-era battles over justification, Western catechesis foregrounded guilt and merit, and the deification horizon receded from ordinary devotion. The twentieth-century recovery of the Fathers — and the Catechism’s deliberate return to Athanasius and Aquinas’s “make men gods” — is the West retrieving what it never doctrinally lost but had popularly muted. One genuine question remains open: whether Western divine simplicity lets deification reach the uncreated God as robustly as the Palamite energies framing insists. That belongs to its own discussion. But on the doctrine itself the two traditions converge — what differs is emphasis and conceptual apparatus, not whether man is truly called to share the life of God.