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All of the sacraments are an invitation to a deeper union with Christ, however, in this post, I will focus primarily on the sacrament of anointing the sick. In this particular sacrament, the invitation to a deeper union with Christ is unique, but at the same time follows the model of other sacraments. In the most straightforward way, anointing of the sick reflects the first sacrament of Christian initiation: Baptism. In both of these sacraments, “there is a bodily washing which brings about a spiritual cleansing” wherein “the application of a substance used for medicinal purposes…procures interior healing” (O’Neill 283). In the sacrament of anointing, oil is used for the same effect, i.e., interior healing. The sacrament of anointing of the sick also brings to mind penance, the other sacrament of healing, and takes into account the entire life of the faithful Catholic. O’Neill writes here that “Anointing ‘is considered by the Fathers as perfecting not only penance but as well the Christian’s whole life which ought to be a continual exercise of penance” (286-7). That said, although there are similarities to other sacraments, this sacrament is unique in that it is typically administered at the close of one’s life or in a situation where physical death could occur, e.g., a life-threatening surgery. Its foundation can be traced back to Christ’s healing ministry and the healing power he granted his disciples. “The disciples’ ritual of healing described by St. Mark (6:13) – which according to Trent hints at anointing – has, in virtue of Christ’s act of institution, developed into the sacrament. Its principal function now is to serve purely as a sacramental symbol; but it has not lost its original significance” (285). The purpose of this sacrament, therefore, is not so much to provide physical healing, but rather spiritual healing and the sacramental graces needed for man’s final battle. In other words, this sacrament’s effect is not so much to heal one of their sins, but rather heal one of the after effects of sin and dispose them to a greater acceptance and trust in God’s mercy while being given a greater ability to bear the difficulties, burdens, and temptations of the devil that may come with suffering and death (287). Thus, the essential virtue at play here is the virtue of fortitude in one’s final moments of their earthly life. 

As one comes to realize in reading Colman O’Neill’s Meeting Christ in the Sacraments, his understanding of the sacraments is seen through the teachings of the great doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas. In recalling what he covered earlier in his book, O’Neill writes that sacraments “are acts of the Church, possessing their own validity as signs of faith and rituals of worship independently of the symbolism and efficacy attributed to them when Christ enters with his saving power” (284). He goes on to discuss the sacrament of anointing the sick and the efficacious symbol of spiritual healing held within it as well as prayers for the bodily health of the suffering Christian. However, he writes that if this is not granted, it does not mean the sacrament was unsuccessful or inadequately administered. It simply means that bodily health was not the will of the Lord, and the “strictly sacramental moment [came] within the context of a ritual of prayer for the sick.” In other words, if the sacrament is administered correctly and the suffering Christian participates to the fullest they can in that moment, then “the strictly sacramental effect will be infallibly procured” (284). 

As for growth in union with Christ, when this sacrament of anointing is administered, the recipient can grow in their relationship with Christ through a variety of different ways. Primarily, as previously mentioned, their union with Christ can be facilitated by conformity to Him and His suffering. This is done by uniting one’s suffering to Christ for the sake of their own sins and the sins of humanity. In this way, they are being joined with Christ’s suffering on the Cross and making reparation for their past sins. In addition, they are being conformed to Christ by suffering for the entire Church. This, in itself, is conformity to the very love of Christ—to lay one’s life down for another and bear the burden of sin for others (278).  

Prior to his focus on the sacrament of anointing, O’Neill’s general discussion on suffering highlights the good that suffering can bring when given meaning in one’s life. Quoting Aquinas, he writes, “‘it happens sometimes’ that a man advances in virtue only when he has to support the burden of poverty or illness or any other kind of suffering” (278). In other words, great suffering or illness can be permitted by God for the good of the individual. It can offer an opportunity for an individual’s personal growth in virtue wherever it is needed in the life and relationship of that specific person with God. Likewise, suffering or illness can offer an opportunity to remember that, in the end, we must depend solely on God and can find all the strength we need from Him if we surrender to His loving arms. Here, the suffering or illness is transformed into something good as the faithful one builds a greater dependence on God. On this subject, O’Neill writes that the “deprivation of [created goods/goodness] on which men set their hearts to the exclusion of God can serve to convince the individual that true happiness is to be found in God alone” (279).

Consequently, even though we, as humans, often consider suffering and death to be unfair and unjust when we supposedly have a loving God, both of these are more than a great good for us when understood in a different light. In his chapter on anointing, he helps the reader to understand that suffering and the eventual death of an individual can not only be viewed as good for the individual, but it is, in fact, necessary for one to die to truly be united with Christ. Although Christ has re-established the opportunity for us to live eternal life with the Father, man must be put back into just relations with God and therefore he must eventually pay the price of original sin by dying. On this topic, O’Neill writes, “The sinner is like a component of a machine, which has been twisted out of shape in an accident. The part must be bent back to its original form if it is to fit back into its socket and fulfill its proper function in the movement of the machine” (278). For a person to be raised up by the mercy of God from his/her sin, there still needs to be justice. Death is therefore where man’s final battle is to be fought, but the Church offers us the sacrament of anointing to persevere through this fight. Anointing provides the faithful with the sacramental graces needed to unite themselves with Christ when their natural inclinations that have been warped by sin weaken them and make them want to turn back. This sacrament thus helps the faithful grow in union with Christ in many ways, but especially by offering the grace to bear the burden of the effect of sin just as He did on the Cross. It is in this great sacrament that we are given faith and fortitude when our sinful nature wants to give in to the devil. Therefore, through anointing, the faithful Christian can unite himself/herself in their final moments with Christ dying on the Cross and fight together against the evil one in order to enter eternal life with God.

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O’Neill, Coleman E. Meeting Christ in the Sacraments. Staten Island, NY: Society of St. Paul/Alba House, 1991.

If someone ought to argue that the sacraments are just part of a generally graced world, i.e. the world is full of grace and so are the sacraments, I’m afraid they would be misguided in their statement. In fact, it is the case that Scripture says, “the world is in the hands of the Evil One” (1 Jn 5:19), and Christ, through the sacraments, comes with a mission of a different order—He came “in person to found ‘the new world’” (de Lubac, 166). By the mercy of God, through the forgiveness of our sins, Christ came to give us the knowledge of salvation. He came to show the way for every person to enter into a state of grace and leave behind the old man in order to attain salvation. Thus, it is not the case that the world is full of grace, it is rather filled with the Evil One and his offer of destruction. Christ offers the grace that is not of this world in order to free us from the snares of the Devil and bring us to eternal life. 

Human beings are both created and sinful by our nature, and it is “always in fact the sinful man who is gratuitously called to conversion, to the divine life: and it is always in fact this divine life which is gratuitously given him along with the pardon for his sins” (168). Grace itself is God’s invitation to share in His divine life and, thus, it is something other than this world,—it is “a way out”—offered through His great gift of Himself and not to be found in this world. Grace is, therefore, wholly other-worldly; it is a transcendent state of being that only the Lord can offer and we are graciously given the opportunity to accept it in order to enter into this state. By sinning, we refuse this invitation and reject the grace that was offered to us (169). It is only through this invitation and our willing acceptance of the invitation that we receive grace. Therefore, the world does not offer grace and we do not live in a grace-filled world, rather we receive this grace through the sacraments and from God’s own invitation to enter a state that we do not naturally experience nor do we ever enter into without Him. 

Going further, the natural world does not offer grace and if we try to look for it in the world, we will undoubtedly fail. De Lubac writes, we can attempt to seek the remedy for sin in natural religion, however, we will never find a remedy. “This remedy is given to us by the central doctrine of Christ the Redeemer… Thus, ‘revelation begins at the point where natural religion falters” (169). It is through this remedy for sin that we are offered once again the opportunity to enter into divine life and it is in and through the sacraments, instituted by Christ Himself, where this invitation lies and, thus, where grace abounds. Therefore, it is only through the sacraments that redemption is found. Through the grace found in the sacraments, we enter into the divine life and the hope of a perpetual state of grace in the next life is re-opened up to us. 

It is often the case, as de Lubac notes, that this idea that we can become like God without God—in other words, receive grace from the world and therefore be divinized without the help of our Lord—is the understanding some people have these days in regards to man’s salvation. However, Yves de Montcheuil writes that “Jesus does not speak of the evils in the social order as springing from a social disorder which could be overcome by means proper to that social order.” He continues, “Human dignity and human justice, separated from God, end by becoming corrupt” (164). The world is permeated with sin, not with grace. It is only through God that grace is given and salvation can be gained, which is why, as Pope St. John Paul II writes, “The Church has a duty to proclaim liberation to millions of human beings…but she also has the corresponding duty of proclaiming this liberation in its full and deep meaning, as Jesus announced it and brought it about.” This freedom—this grace—is found only in “the joy of knowing God and being known by him” through “reconciliation [with Him] and pardon” by Him (165). Therefore, it would be a great misunderstanding to dissociate man’s salvation with God and His infinite grace. Furthermore, it would be incorrect to assume that His grace is something the world offers rather than gifted by God Himself wholly apart from this world. 

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Works Cited

Lubac, Henri de. A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1984.

Congratulations newly baptized and confirmed Catholic Christians! What a joy it is for you to be within the arms of Mother Church. I welcome you wholeheartedly and am here to simply offer you ways in which, going forward, you can continue to draw on the sacraments for the rest of your life. We’ll begin by discussing your baptism and continue with ways in which you can approach and understand the sacrament of the Eucharist every time you come to Mass. 

Now, to start, as you have learned in OCIA, the meaning of your baptism is your entrance into the Church. This entrance is an immersion into the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. When baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with the pouring of holy water, you became a new man/woman. You effectively put off the old man (original sin) by dying with Christ in the water and become a new man in Christ when you emerge. In reflecting on your baptism in the days and years to come, you can use both the Scripture passages of Moses and the Exodus (Ex. 14:10-31) as well as the first Passover wherein the angel of death flew over the houses of those marked with the blood of the lamb sharing in the paschal feast that was prescribed by the Lord (Ex. 10:1-30). 

We can first see how our baptisms are a reflection of Moses and the Israelites crossing of the Red Sea by remembering that the Lord saved the Isreaelites by parting the waters and allowing them to cross while drowning the Egyptians when they followed closely behind (Danielou, 88). Here, the enemy was in the sea and we were saved when we crossed the sea, while our enemies were destroyed in the water. Likewise, the devil drowns in the holy water of baptism and we emerge saved by the Holy Spirit (90). 

In the first Passover, we see both the reflection of baptism as well as the Eucharist. Here, the angel of death passes over all of the houses that are marked with a cross using the blood of the sacrificial lamb. Similarly, by the blood of Christ poured out for us on the Cross (our Sacrificial Lamb), we are anointed with the sphragis in baptism and are no longer subject to the angel of death (167). Our bodies are now houses of the Holy Spirit marked as the Lord’s (164), and just as the Israelites had the paschal lamb within their homes, so do we, once baptized, consume the Paschal Lamb, Our Lord, Jesus Christ within us (168-9). Therefore, each time we receive Our Lord in the Eucharist at Mass, we remember the salvation we gained in our baptism and the sacrifice Our Lord made for us on the Cross. In fact, each time the host and the wine are consecrated, the Last Supper (Passover), the Passion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension are reenacted for our re-unification with Christ and thus our union with the Heavenly Trinity is restored (141). 

Following your baptism, when you received the oil (chrism) of anointing in confirmation, you became worthy of the name Christian (little Christ) (116) receiving the spiritual seal and communication of the Holy Spirit once again making you docile to Him and the virtues (119). Thus, you were marked by the Trinity as one of His beloved and remain marked indelibly. Though, in your life, you can willingly choose to turn away from your heavenly Father, you are forever His from this moment on. You have been bathed in salvation, anointed with the spiritual seal, and risen with Christ.

In receiving the Eucharist, you entered more deeply into the life of Christ. You became one with Him in eating His flesh and drinking His blood. When receiving the Eucharist you enter into the marriage union between Christ and His Bride, the Church (191). You, as the Bride, receive Our Lord’s Body and Blood and are unified in flesh and spirit, making you truly one with Our Lord. Every time you come to Mass and receive Him, you are celebrating the great marriage between us and Christ, who consummated this union by dying on the Cross (192). It is truly a glorious occasion and each time you receive this sacrament you can ponder more deeply your unity with Him and the great graces that flow from that union. 

In a similar vein, you ought to, each time you come to Mass, prepare yourself to be an offering for Christ as He offers Himself to you. Just like in a marriage, both parties lay down their lives for one another in body and spirit and become one for one another. As you approach the altar each time remembering Christ’s Passion, you can meditate on the offering of yourself—the dying of yourself—in response to the great gift of Himself that He has made possible in the breaking of the bread and dying on the Cross (139). In our offering and His perfect self-giving, we truly rise with Him to the Father—“We are no longer on earth, but in some way transferred to heaven” (135).

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Works Cited

Danielou, Jean. The Bible and the Liturgy. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1956.

As mentioned in my earlier blog, Joseph Ratzinger took great pains to explain the need for the sacraments and the desire for us to encounter Christ in these ways in Theology of the Liturgy: The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence. It is through the sacraments that Our Lord desires to meet us and for us to enter into His history. As Ratzinger puts it, “to receive the Christian sacraments means to enter into the history proceeding from Christ…that opens up to man the historical context that truly allows him to live and leads him into his true uniqueness—into the unity with God that is his eternal future” (163). Therefore, the sacraments are not simply pleasant rites of passage, but the real entrance of ourselves into God’s history with mankind. 

Louis Bouyer in his work, Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God, reiterates these ideas and implies an extension of them by not only pointing out that the sacraments are how Christ desires to be reunited with His Creation, but are, in fact, the proper and most suitable way in which this restoration is to occur. The sacraments are the very way we enter into, or assimilate into, His body. This entrance is the completion of the divine Love’s offering to be reunited with Him and restored to Creation in the way it had always meant to be (230-231). God had always planned for the sacraments to be the authentic reentry into original being—the return of the Creative order to its destiny. 

As Ratzinger notes, we are blessed with the opportunity to enter into Christ’s own history through His gratuitous gift of salvation recognized in and through the sacraments. Similarly, Bouyer also makes the point that the world is in God, not the other way around. We enter into His history, and are immersed in Him (231). In other words, the cosmos are the very expression of the Divine Love and these same cosmos were redeemed and adopted by this Love. Through Bouyer’s work, we catch a greater glimpse into the divine plan and see that we were always meant to be sons and daughters of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It was that same Love that, by its necessity in being Love Itself, produced the world, and when we fell away from Him, brought us back to Love and re-incorporated us into Him. Sacraments—the means of this re-incorporation—are thus not simply pleasant rites of passage within the Church. Sacraments are God’s expression of His divine Love wherein He had always planned to reunite us with Him and restore us into the divine Creation we were destined to become. 

The sacraments offer this reunification through a restoration of man as person, created in the image of the personal God. Bouyer notes that the God of Christianity is not purely transcendent, nor immanent only in an abstraction. Before doing this, Bouyer points to the difficulties that the Greek philosophers had in reconciling the divine’s distance and proximity to human reality. He wrote that they were “never able to stop confusing God with the world, and never really grasped the omnipresence of God in the world” (182). What was lacking for the ancient philosophers was the notion of personhood. Bouyer later continues by stating, “For Plato, the invisible world was one of ideas, whereas the invisible world Christians believe in is one of persons” (196). In other words, for the Christian, Love and person are intrinsically connected, therefore divine Love cannot simply be an idea. Divine Love is the Trinity—the great communion of Love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that continuously extends to the Creation made in its image—a communion of Persons engaging in “exchanges so rich and deep as to totally defy our attempts at analysis” (185). By accepting and receiving the sacraments, we do not just reiterate an idea or a thought, but are truly reconciled with God Himself. 

Ratzinger also extends this reality of personhood to the sacraments, through which man’s being as person is realized. In discussing the supernatural nature of a meal, he states that man discovers that “his ‘being-there’ [Dasein] is grounded in communion with, or ‘being-with’ [Mitsen mit] the world” (157). The meal, exalted in the form of the Eucharistic Lord, carries the individual from purely an individual detached from community to their true created self. In this, what is realized through the sacraments and in the persons of the Trinity is their image in God.

Therefore, when we receive a sacrament, we are not just going through a meaningless production or empty ritual. We are being restored to the Father’s Love and thus being recreated into who we were meant to be. Going even further, we enter into the plan that He had for us from the beginning. Through the ready and willing acceptance of these sacraments, we enter into the divine life. We become part of the return of the created order back to God and in turn witness the world becoming divine (Bouyer, 232-233)!

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Works Cited

Bouyer, Louis. Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God. Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1988.

Ratzinger, Joseph. Theology of the Liturgy, “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” 153-168.

In a recent class with our adult catechumens on the sacraments, one young man raised the question, “Do I really need the sacraments? After all, can’t I encounter God on my own without the rites of the Church?” A good question, indeed. In response, I said that, yes, we need the sacraments, but also yes, they are not the only ways in which we can encounter God, e.g., through other people, contemplative prayer, the Rosary, etc.. However, the sacraments are the primary and most important ways in which we are united with Our Lord. The reason in which we need the sacraments is to meet the Lord in the ways in which He desired us to meet Him. 

Christ instituted the Eucharist in the Last Supper and gave Himself to us. He specifically told the apostles to, “Do this in memory of me” (Lk 22:19). From then on, to present day, and to eternity, Christ can be found in the consecrated host. His body, blood, soul, and divinity, are truly present when bread and wine are consecrated within the holy sacrifice of the Mass. This expresses the true definition of a sacrament according to Catholic understanding. The concept, as Josef Pieper writes in In Search of the Sacred: Contributions to an Answer, “declares that in a certain special and specific situation the ‘symbols’ expressed through observable action and audible words not only mean something but also, by being acted out, transform this same meaning into objective reality…coming exclusively from God’s power” (28). It is here, in the sacrality of this action, where we meet and encounter the Lord face to face and receive Him into our very selves. In this celebration, we once again see that He desires to give himself to us as gift, and what a great cause for joy and festivity! What a great gift He has given to us—He’s given his very self! In this way, it is clear that we absolutely need the sacrament of the Eucharist. 

It is in the celebration of the Christian sacraments, especially the Eucharist, that God’s real presence is found among his people (Pieper, 31), and, because of this, one is more easily able to contemplate the world as good and understand the love in which the Lord has and continues to pour out upon us. 

In Joseph Ratzinger’s Theology of the Liturgy: The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence, he writes that the sacraments do not only point to the vertical dimension (i.e., “the call of God that makes a man human in the first place”), but also point beyond to the horizontal (i.e., historical) dimension of human existence. In order to live a life of holiness united to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we need the sacraments because, as Ratzinger puts it, “to receive the Christian sacraments means to enter into the history proceeding from Christ…that opens up to man the historical context that truly allows him to live and leads him into his true uniqueness—into the unity with God that is his eternal future” (163). It is precisely through the sacraments that we are brought into Christ’s history wherein he instituted the sacraments into time and space for man to enter into and receive for his benefit. Within the Christian sacraments, the God of Jesus Christ appears and is “here for men and is defined precisely by his being with people….[He shows Himself as the] Word that calls us, and the love that unites us” (161). In choosing to be with us, He also chooses where and how and in what ways we are to be reconciled and united with Him. 

In order for human beings to participate in God’s divine life once again, God chose to send His Son to be born into the world and meet us in a human way, and He continues to meet us in a human way in each celebration of a sacrament. The sacraments open the way for our entrance into the history of Jesus Christ, and through this connection, Ratzinger writes, they provide “a liberating union with God’s eternal love…[which] has broken into his prison.” Ratzinger beautifully completes his thought by writing that “the chain of the horizontal that binds man has become in Christ the guide rope of salvation that pulls us to the shore of God’s eternity” (164). God knew He needed to enter into human history in order for us to meet Him again. In the same way, He has chosen to allow man to enter back into union with Him through the sacraments which take place in the time and space of human history. 

To go further, God chose and determined the mode in which His presence would be available, but He did so in a way in which we, humans, can encounter Him. In other words, as Ratzinger puts it, if a man goes to church to receive the sacraments and understands the meaning of the sacraments, he knows he ought to receive them “not because he thinks the spiritual God needs material means in order to touch man’s spirit…on the contrary, [he does this] because he knows that he, being a man, can encounter God only in a human way…: in the form of fraternal solidarity, corporeality, and historicity.” He does this, Ratzinger continues, “because he knows that he, as a man, cannot personally control when and how and where God has to manifest himself to him” (167). It is God that chooses in His ultimate freedom to manifest Himself in the ways in which He desires and that is through the sacraments, thereby making the sacraments necessary for you and I. 

If, however, we make the claim that there is no need for the sacraments, that there are, in fact, others ways in which we can encounter God and thus these sacraments are dispensable (or just other ways to encounter Him), we put to the side God’s decision in uniting us with Him in the ways He determined and longs for and hastily write them His sacraments as being equally important as other forms of encounter. This would be a grave and very sad mistake. God has given us the sacraments in order for us to enter into His history precisely to allow our complete and total reunification with Him. This is, in fact, as Ratzinger puts it, “the purpose of our going to church at all.” It is here that this love seeks man “utterly and entirely,” not just as an “isolated spirit,” but “in the body of his historicity” where man “arrives at its goal and comes to its fulfillment” (168).

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Works Cited

Pieper, Josef. In Search of the Sacred: Contributions to an Answer, 7-50.

Ratzinger, Joseph. Theology of the Liturgy, “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” 153-168.