WYSIWYG in what way did the events of Good Friday make possible salvation and eternal life? (Eternal life??? What kind of punishment would that be?) Believers presumably accept that no-one got to heaven before Jesus himself accended into heaven?

By the way, that Catholic Encyclopaedia you recommend as a starting point is about 100 years out of date. It is interesting only as an indicator of what fairy tales the gullible were prepared to believe Once Upon a Time. Take the Catholic Encyclopaedia on "limbo" for instance - a depository for babies who died unbaptised and were therefore unfit for heaven on account of being tainted with "original sin" - this having been visited on them because of events many generations earlier in the garden of Eden. (Whoever wrote Genesis unfortunately forgot to mention original sin and it fell on others to invent it.)

Well of course people are no longer prepared to swallow that kind of tosh, so the rules had to be rewritten. (Yet again.)