Is Peace (Shalom) unconditional in the Bible? (Romans 5:1)

Protestant apologist James White has a few claims he regularly brings up against Catholicism, and which many Protestants blindly repeat. The two most common claims I've seen him make are asking Catholics "who is the Blessed Man of Romans 4:8?" and "Roman Catholicism cannot provide the true peace which the Gospel provides us". White says in his book and website (see here):

There can be no doubt what lies behind Paul’s use of the term peace in this [Romans 5:1] passage. The Hebrew steeped in Scripture knew full well the meaning of shalom. It does not refer merely to a cessation of hostilities. It is not a temporary cease-fire. The term shalom would not refer to a situation where two armed forces face each other across a border, ready for conflict, but not yet at war. Shalom refers to a fullness of peace, a wellness of relationship. Those systems [e.g. Roman Catholicism] that proclaim a man-centered scheme of justification cannot explain the richness of this word. They cannot provide peace because a relationship that finds its source and origin in the actions of imperfect sinners will always be imperfect itself. The phrase "we have peace" [Rom 5:1] in regard to God, properly means, God is at peace with us, his wrath towards us is removed.

This all sounds well and good, but all too often it turns out that things that sound good to human ears are often not actually what the Bible teaches (cf 2 Tim 4:3). White's lack of Biblical analysis in his presentation of how the Bible uses the term "peace" was suspicious to me, so I decided to see for myself how the Bible uses the Greek/Hebrew terms Peace/Shalom (here). Does the Bible speak of Peace/Shalom as something that is permanent and unconditional the way White makes it out to be? Here are some texts I've found that use the same Greek/Hebrew term "peace" as in Romans 5:1 that I think cast serious doubt on White's bold assertions: 

Did Jesus forbid "vain repetitions"?

There are plenty of Catholic articles that address the issue of "vain repetition" which Jesus forbade in Matthew 6:7, so rather than repeat them I want to share some unique findings that most of those articles don't tell you. 

 

First of all, it is shocking how everyone automatically assumes "vain repetition" is even an accurate  translation in the first place! The Greek word that Matthew uses for "vain repetitions" is a single term, battalogeo (see here). This Greek word is found nowhere else in the Bible, and apparently nowhere else in Greek literature (see here). This detail alone means we cannot be too dogmatic about the meaning. The Greek term is a compound of "batta" and "words". You can look to see that scholars admit they aren't sure what "batta" means, so they can only propose various theories based on the rest of the verse! So not only does the Greek term not clearly suggest "repetition," much less "vain," there's actually plenty of room to propose other meanings. Scholars seem divided on whether "batta" refers to an ancient pagan king who "stuttered" (which could mean various things), or whether "batta" refers to a pagan poet who wrote long drawn out poems, or whether "batta" is a made up word and equivalent to our term "blah blah blah" (i.e. babbling). The last option seems the most reasonable if the word appears nowhere else, and thus Jesus was saying something along the lines of: "When you pray, do not pray blah blah blah like the pagans".

From this first point onward, we should stop giving the so-called translation "vain repetition" any credibility at all. The origin of "vain repetitions" seems to actually be a Protestant agenda to "translate" the Bible into English with an anti-Catholic spin. This is one reason Catholics were always suspicious of Protestant Bibles. Think about it, how often "vain repetition" is turned into an instant attack on the Rosary, when this one Greek term doesn't actually clearly say anything about "vain repetition"? This Protestant bias is confirmed in the fact the King James Version is what translated "vain repetitions," whereas some honest mainstream Protestant translations use other phrases (see here), such as "do not keep on babbling like pagans" (NIV), or "do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do" (ESV). The Catholic Bibles that I consulted say "speak not much, as the heathens" (Douay-Rheims and Latin Vulgate), and "do not babble like the pagans" (NAB), and "empty phrases" (RSVCE). Again, using the word "repetition" in one's translation is disingenuous per the limited data we have, and can really only signify anti-Catholic bias.