The Octave of Pentecost and the Sacraments

It has often been claimed that one of the triumphs of the post-Conciliar reform was to abolish the octave of Pentecost, and by doing so, “restore” the original character of the Easter season as a single great feast of fifty days. For example, in his apologia for the reform, Abp Bugnini writes, “The Easter season lasts fifty days, beginning with the Easter Vigil and ending with Pentecost Sunday. This is attested by the ancient and universal tradition of the Church, which has always celebrated the seven weeks of Easter as though they were a single day that ends with the feast of Pentecost. For this reason, the octave of Pentecost, which was added to the fifty days of Easter in the sixth century, has been abolished.” (The Reform of the Liturgy, 1948-1975; p. 319 of the English edition.)

Folio 82r of the Gellone Sacramentary, ca. 780 AD, with last prayer of the Mass of Pentecost, three prayers for Vespers, then the Mass of Pentecost Monday, the beginning of that of Tuesday.

The octave of Pentecost is attested in every single pertinent liturgical book of the Roman Rite that we have, going back to the Wurzburg lectionary in the middle of the 7th century. [1] It is part of the liturgical patrimony which the rite shares with the rest of Christendom, as e.g., the Byzantine Rite, which still keeps Pentecost with an afterfeast that lasts until the following Saturday.

But this trope about the supposed fifty days of Easter was very convenient to the reformers’ mindset. It posits that everyone had always been stupidly wrong about the liturgy for well over a millennium, wantonly discarding a part of the Church’s ancient and “original” tradition to no good purpose. This being the case, it made sense for the smart and right-thinking men of the Consilium to go back behind the books and “restore” what they believed, mostly (not entirely) in good faith, to be that “original” tradition, erasing whatever they deemed necessary in the process. And thus Bugnini could write in a footnote to the text cited above, “Pentecost is the octave Sunday after Easter. An octave of an octave is illogical.” Yes, indeed: they were the first people to think logically about the liturgy for fourteen centuries…

Many years ago, the late Fr Hunwicke wrote an article about this, in which he stated, “I wonder just how securely founded in both the Bible and the patristic traditions, of West as well as East, this newly minted view of Eastertide is.” In response, I wrote a pair of articles (part 1; part 2) arguing that the answer is, “Not very.” These articles can be summarized in two basic points.

1. The same Fathers who attest to the idea of Easter as a continuous feast of fifty days ALL do so in reference to the absence, and indeed, the prohibition, of fasting during that period. This stands, of course, in contrast to the very strict fasting which they enjoined for the forty days of Lent, and most of them state this contrast very explicitly.

This alone is enough to give the lie to the claim that the post-Conciliar Rite restored the original tenor of the Easter season, since this contrast barely exists anymore. Catholics are now required to fast on a grand total of two days in Lent, and free to eat meat on 38 of the 46 days from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday inclusive.

2. Regardless of what the Church Fathers have to say on the subject, no liturgical rite, including the Novus Ordo, has ever actually celebrated the period from Easter to Pentecost as a single feast of fifty days. All liturgical traditions have always articulated a clear distinction between Easter with its octave and the rest of the Paschal season. And in point of fact, the Novus Ordo has put this distinction into even higher relief by abolishing the custom of saying the Gloria in excelsis at the Mass and the Te Deum in the Office on every day of Eastertide. (The one historical exception is Rogation Monday.)

A very nice setting in alternating chant and polyphony of the Kyrie of the Eastertide Mass setting Lux et origo.

When I wrote these two articles seven years ago, I toyed with a particular explanation of what the octave of Pentecost represents, but I couldn’t quite make it work in my head properly, and gave up on it. Yesterday, somehow, after not thinking about it for years, the solution finally came to me. My idea is that each day of the octave represents one of the seven Sacraments.

Before I explain this, a few things need to be stated. First, I am not claiming that these Masses arise as a group from a developed sacramental theology that had formally classified specific seven rites and practices together with the name “Sacraments”. That is a tradition that would not be solidified in its formal expression until much later. Nevertheless, each of them does reflect something which the Church always understood to be an essential part of the economy of grace. Perhaps it is not very important whether this is the result of a deliberate design on the part of human authors, or a happy accident guided by that Providence under which there are no real accidents. (On this point, I would like to thank my friend Gerhard Eger of Canticum Salomonis for his wise counsel.)

Second, as I explained yesterday, the octave of Pentecost is an Ember week, and imitates the arrangement of the previous Ember week, the first of Lent. Originally, Pentecost Thursday was an aliturgical day, on which no Mass was celebrated, as the Thursdays of Lent were until the early decades of the eighth century. This means that if each Mass of the Pentecost octave were to represent one of the Sacraments, one would have to be left out, or, so to speak, represented by its absence. I will explain this further below.

The next page of the Gellone Sacramentary (82v) after the one given above. Note that the Mass of Ember Wednesday (which begins with rubric in the fifth line) is followed immediately by that of Ember Friday (rubric in the tenth line from the bottom), and no Mass is given for Thursday.

Third, this explanation does not require that each Sacrament be mentioned explicitly on only one of the seven days of the octave, and nowhere else within it. The modern conceit that a liturgical day must have one and only one easily graspable theme is completely foreign to the Church’s liturgical tradition. And likewise, it is not necessary for every text on each day to refer to that day’s Sacrament, or for the Sacraments to be represented in the order in which they are customarily given.

When Our Lord rose from the dead and appeared to the disciples, they did not immediately rush out into the streets to proclaim His Resurrection to the world. The Roman liturgy itself reflects this fact in the choice of its Gospel readings for Easter; neither at the vigil (Matthew 28, 1-7) nor on the feast (Mark 16, 1-7) does He appear in person. The Resurrection is solemnly proclaimed in the introit of Easter Sunday, which speaks in the person of the Lord: “I have risen, and am still with thee.” But note here the singular number, “with thee.” The Resurrection is made known to the individual believer, as the introit goes on to say, “thy knowledge is become full of wonder”, but it is not yet the time for the believer to manifest it to the world at large.

The forty days from Easter to Ascension inclusive represent, of course, the period which St Luke describes at the beginning of the Acts (1, 3-5): “(Jesus) showed himself alive (to the Apostles) after his passion… , appearing to them for forty days, and … commanded them, that they should … wait for the promise of the Father, ‘which you have heard … by my mouth. For … you shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost, not many days hence.” The “not many days hence” are represented by the pause between Ascension and Pentecost. It is only at the latter feast, with the coming of the Holy Spirit, that the public mission of the Church begins, and the Resurrection is proclaimed openly to the world.

Therefore, the seven days of Pentecost represent something substantially different from what the Easter season represents, namely, the point at which the Church begins to fulfill the Great Commission, making disciples of all nations. This is the point at which She begins to live the life of grace, engendered and nourished by the Sacraments, the means by which She will carry forth the preaching and teaching of the Faith from the first Pentecost to the end of the world. And this final period is represented in the liturgy by the long haul of weeks (more than half the year) from the feast until Advent, which begins with a Gospel about the end of the world.

Within the first week of this period, the seven Masses of the Pentecost octave represent these means, the seven Sacraments, as follows.

Pentecost Sunday, of course, represents Confirmation, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the individual believer. Confirmation is only administered after Baptism, which has already been mentioned by the vigil of Pentecost, a day which, like the vigil of Easter, has been dedicated to the celebration of Baptism since time out of mind.

The Sacrament of Confirmation depicted at the beginning of the first edition of the Pontifical of Pope Clement VIII, issued in 1595.

The Mass of Pentecost Monday represents Confession. This is stated in the epistle, Acts 10, 34 and 42-48, in which St Peter says, “To (Jesus Christ) all the prophets give testimony, that by his name all who believe in him receive remission of sins.” The Gospel, John 3, 16-21, speaks clearly of sin and the need for repentance, confession and forgiveness: “Everyone that doth evil hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, that his works may not be reproved. But he that doth truth, cometh to the light, that his works may be made manifest, because they are done in God.” But the word “confession” can also mean “a profession of belief”, and this is also reflected in the Gospel reading: “He that believeth in (the Son of God) is not judged. But he that doth not believe, is already judged.”

The Mass of Pentecost Tuesday also represents Baptism, the entry into life as a member of Christ’s mystical body, the beginning and sine qua non of all the other Sacraments. In the Gospel, Jesus proclaims, “I am the door. By me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved: and he shall go in, and go out, and shall find pastures.” The epistle unites Baptism to Confirmation as it tells of what Peter and John did in Samaria. “They were only baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then (the Apostles) laid their hands upon them, and they received the Holy Spirit.”

The Mass of Ember Wednesday, at which the Gospel is taken from the Eucharistic discourse of John 6 (44-52), is the clearest and most obvious expression of this arrangement. “I am the bread of life. … This is the bread which cometh down from heaven; that if any man eat of it, he may not die. … If any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever; and the bread that I will give, is my flesh, for the life of the world.” The Eucharist is centrally placed in the middle of the week as the greatest of the Sacraments, the one which is supposed to be frequently celebrated, and on a fast day, the Ember Wednesday, since the Church has always regarded fasting as a necessary preparation for the Eucharist.

The Institution of the Holy Eucharist, by Federico Barocci, from the Aldobrandini Chapel of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome; 1603-8.

As noted above, following this explanation, one of the Sacraments would have to be represented by its absence, since Pentecost Thursday was originally an aliturgical day. This is the Sacrament of Holy Orders, since the thing that does not happen on such a day, the celebration of Mass, is specific to the exercise of the priesthood. But the Gospel assigned to this day when it was given a Mass, Luke 9, 1-6, fits in with this just as well, since it begins with a mention of the first priests, the twelve apostles, being sent out into the world by the Lord for the first time, “to preach the kingdom of God, and heal the sick.”

The Gospel of the Mass of Ember Friday is Luke 5, 17-26, the healing of the paralytic whose friends lower him through the roof into the house where the Lord is teaching. This represents the last rites and the Anointing of the Sick, even though such healing is also mentioned the previous day. Note that the man healed is a paralytic; not on his deathbed, as far as we can tell from the story, but very much like a man on his deathbed, incapable of moving himself.

The paralytic lowered through the roof, in a fresco of the 8th or 9th century preserved in the basilica of St Sabbas on the Aventine Hill in Rome. On the left side is shown the calling of Ss James and John.

Lastly, the Mass of Ember Saturday represents Marriage, since the Gospel, Luke 4, 38-44, begins with the healing of St Peter’s mother-in-law. When I first tried to put this explanation together in my head several years ago, this seemed to be the sticking point, because the Gospel makes no direct mention of Peter’s wife. (Indeed, it is a reasonable theory that Peter was free to leave everything behind and follow the Lord because by the time they met, he was a widower.) It now seems to me to make sense for the following reasons.

We know nothing about this woman, apart from the brief mention of her here and in the synoptic parallels, but conflicts between husbands and their mothers-in-law are proverbial in all times and cultures. Notice then the words of the epistle, Romans 5, 1-5, which also provides the text of the introit: “tribulation worketh patience, and patience trial, and trial hope, and hope confoundeth not: because the charity of God is poured forth in our hearts, by the Holy Ghost, who is given to us.” This speaks to the virtue of patience, and the practice of charity, which are of the essence of marriage, and always necessary for its flourishing, not only between the husband and wife, but also between and within their families.

The Healing of St Peter’s Mother-in-law, and other stories from the same part of the Gospel of Luke and its synoptic parallels, in an engraving made in 1593 by the Flemish artist Johannes Wierix (1549 - ca. 1620). This Gospel is also read on the Thursday of the third week of Lent, as noted in the title block at top.   

I also notice that the first reading, Joel 2, 28-32, contains two references to men and women together. “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy… Moreover, upon my servants and handmaids in those days I will pour forth my spirit.” Likewise, this passage says, “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh”, referring to the fact that marriage is the joining of man and woman in the flesh. As Adam says in the time of man’s innocence, when marriage was instituted as an honorable estate, “ ‘This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.’ Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh.” (Gen. 2, 23-24)

[1] Here I say “liturgical book” advisedly, because, as I have noted before, the octave is not attested in the so-called Leonine Sacramentary. But the Leonine Sacramentary is not a liturgical book, properly speaking; it is a collection of Masses, which was not designed to be used for actual celebration of the liturgy. It is also something of an unreliable narrator.

Schmemann’s Critique of the West (Part 1): The Accusations

Alexander Schmemann (1921–83) was a highly influential Russian Orthodox priest and author who left a major mark on the renewal of Byzantine liturgical and sacramental theology, and on the thinking of some Roman Catholic liturgists as well. He was famous (infamous?) for his intense attacks on Western theology, which he believed to be thoroughly contaminated with a rationalism and a reductionism inimical to mystery. (It should not be forgotten that he also rather sharply criticized many aspects of modern Eastern Orthodoxy.) It would be tempting for traditionalists to give ear to these arguments because, if they are correct, they would seem to demonstrate a broader liturgical crisis in the West that is rooted in a false Thomistic distinction, which, over the centuries, changed how Christians understood and received the sacraments and liturgy.

My goal in this new series of articles is to summarize his major objections (part 1) and then respond to them in a way that is both sympathetic to whatever is legitimate in his concerns, and sharply critical of his misunderstanding (at times extreme) of Western theology (parts 2 and subsequent).

One of Schmemann’s most important books, For the Life of the World, expounds how the Church is a sacrament/epiphany of Christ, and how the Church is her liturgy. After meditating on the Church’s liturgy as the work of Christ extended in time, Fr. Schmemann addresses secularism, which he defines as “above all a negation of worship” (p. 146), because its core doctrine is a negation of “the sacramentality of man and world. A secularist views the world as containing within itself its meaning and the principles of knowledge and action” (p. 147). He then cites the Lateran council of 1215 and St. Thomas Aquinas as watershed moments in the origin of secularism as a post-Patristic and anti-Patristic way of conceiving the world and its relation to God.

Here is a key passage:

At the end of the twelfth century a Latin theologian, Berengarius of Tours, was condemned for his teaching on the Eucharist. He maintained that because the presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements is “mystical” or “symbolic,” it is not real. The Lateran Council which condemned him … simply reversed the formula. It proclaimed that since Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is real, it is not “mystical.” What is truly decisive here is precisely the disconnection and the opposition of the two terms verum and mystice, the acceptance, on both sides, that they are mutually exclusive. (p. 152)

Aquinas, starting from this point, introduced the dichotomy characteristic of secularism:

And since then, Christian thought, in scholasticism and beyond it, never ceased to oppose these terms … it is indeed implied already in Thomism, with its basic epistemological distinction between causa prima and causae secundae. Here is the real cause of secularism, which is ultimately nothing else but the affirmation of the world’s autonomy, of its self-sufficiency in terms of reason, knowledge, and action. The downfall of Christian symbolism led to the dichotomy of the “natural” and “supernatural” as the only framework of Christian thought and experience. (p. 153)

(Note that Schmemann, in effect, is summarizing DeLubac’s argument in Surnaturel.) It follows that, Aquinas—the theologian par excellence of the Latin West—has, according to Schmemann, a different metaphysics or ontology than the Church Fathers do.

Later on, Fr. Schmemann explains further by explicating the relationship between sacrament and liturgy. He explains that the Church Fathers related these two in an ontologically different manner than Aquinas and Scholasticism:

In the early Church, in the writings of the Fathers, sacraments, inasmuch as they are given any systematic interpretation, are always explained in the context of their actual liturgical celebration, the explanation being, in fact, an exegesis of the liturgy itself in all its ritual complexity and concreteness. The medieval De Sacramentis, however, tends from its very inception to isolate the “sacrament” from liturgical context, to find and to define in terms as precise as possible its essence i.e., that which distinguishes it from the “non-sacrament.” Sacrament in a way begins to be opposed to liturgy. It has, of course, ritual expression, its “signum” which belongs to its essence, but this sign is viewed now as ontologically different from all other signs, symbols, and rites of the Church. And because of this difference, the precise sacramental sign alone is considered, to the exclusion of all other “liturgy,” the proper object of theological attention. One can for example read and reread the elaborate treatment given in St. Thomas’ Summa to sacraments without yet knowing much about their liturgical celebration. (p. 163)

Again:

St. Maximus the Confessor, the sacramental theologian par excellence of the patristic age, calls the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist symbols (“symbola”), images (“apeikonismata”), and mysteries (“mysteria”). “Symbolical” here is not only not opposed to “real,” but embodies it as its very expression and mode of manifestation. Historians of theology, in their ardent desire to maintain the myth of theological continuity and orderly “evolution,” here again find their explanation in the “imprecision” of patristic terminology. They do not seem to realize that the Fathers’ use of “symbolon” (and related terms) is not “vague” or “imprecise” but simply different from that of the later theologians, and that the subsequent transformation of these terms constitutes indeed the source of one of the greatest theological tragedies. (p. 165)

And driving home his argument:

In the early tradition . . . the relationship between the sign in the symbol (A) and that which it “signifies” (B) is neither a merely semantic one (A means B), nor causal (A is the cause of B), nor representative (A represents B). We called this relationship an epiphany. “A is B” means that the whole of A expresses, communicates, reveals, manifests, the “reality” of B (although not necessarily the whole of it) without, however, losing its own ontological reality, without being dissolved in another “res.” But it was precisely this relationship between the A and the B, between the sign and the signified, that was changed. Because of the reduction of knowledge to rational or discursive knowledge, there appears between A and B a hiatus. The symbol may still be a means of knowledge but, as all knowledge, it is knowledge about and not knowledge of. It can be a revelation about the “res,” but not the epiphany of the “res” itself. A can mean B, or represent it, or even, in certain instances, be the “cause” of its presence; but A is no longer viewed as the very means of “participation” in B. Knowledge and participation are now two different realities, two different orders. (p. 168)

It is this kind of reasoning that leads Fr. Schmemann to conclude: “The doctrine of transubstantiation, in its Tridentine form, is truly the collapse, or rather the suicide, of sacramental theology” (p. 170). One may certainly sympathize with this line of argument, inasmuch as we see conventional Thomists teaching about sacraments in isolation or abstraction from liturgy and exaggerating the principle of magisterial authority to the denigration and effective cancelation of tradition.

Next week, I will begin my response by answering this question: Did the Lateran Council give a bad and unpatristic definition of “real” as opposed to “mystical”?
 

with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s Substack “Tradition & Sanity”; personal site; composer site; publishing house Os Justi Press and YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify pages.

The Four Qualities of Liturgy: Validity, Licitness, Fittingness, and Authenticity

Below is the full text of the lecture I gave at Queen of Peace Parish in Patton, Pennsylvania, on September 21, 2020, a video of which has also been posted at YouTube (here). Although certain ideas in this talk have been discussed in other articles of mine, the synthesis offered here represents, for me at least, an intellectual breakthrough in responding to what I have increasingly come to see as the impoverished state of liturgical discourse, which is typically limited to only two categories (validity and liceity). Although much attention is paid to fittingness in the realm of sacred art, it deserves to be considered a liturgical category alongside the aforementioned pair; and finally, joining these must be the category of authenticity or legitimacy, as an irreducibly distinct perfection. Only by considering all four qualities can we arrive at an adequate assessment. [UPDATED ON 11/12/20 with an improved version of the chart.]

The celebration of the traditional Mass of the Roman Rite is becoming more and more common; it seems that its popularity has been an unintended consequence of both the chaos of the current pontificate and the disappointment of many Catholics with their pastors and parishes during the COVID pandemic. “Enough is enough!” is a frequently heard reaction. People are looking for worship that is reverent, prayerful, God-oriented, and deeply refreshing, and for priests who are truly committed to the care of souls. This, of course, is the work of the Holy Spirit, tugging at the heartstrings of baptized and confirmed Catholics, in whom there was planted the seed of Trinitarian life, which urges us to enter into the divine mystery.

However, there are certain difficulties in our situation, too. A vast amount of information, good, bad, indifferent, and inaccurate, circulates on the internet. Lay Catholics are seldom equipped to be able to understand what they’re reading about, especially when we get “into the weeds” of liturgical history and reform. How are blogs going to equip us with the ability to navigate thorny questions about the pope’s authority, the Church’s fidelity to tradition, the duty of obedience (and the limits thereof), and so on? There is a great need for careful, thoughtful, well-informed presentations on liturgical matters, so that we can deepen our understanding of the complex issues involved, without losing the simplicity of our faith, or the spontaneity of our interior life as we strive to be the saints Our Lord is calling us to be.

After many years, I have come to the realization that a lot of the time, people are talking past one another in liturgical discussions, and that is because they are talking about different aspects or properties of the liturgy, while failing to make the necessary distinctions. There are, in fact, four properties that are always supposed to belong to any liturgy: validity; licitness; fittingness; and authenticity. All of them are important, none of them is dispensable. They are meant to work together, in harmony, to bring us the fullness of divine worship intended by Christ for His Church. The problems we have experienced in recent decades have a lot to do with an exaggerated emphasis on one or another of these qualities, at the expense of the rest. I will begin by defining each one, and then talk about how they are related.

Validity

First, validity. With validity we are looking at a fairly straightforward question: does a sacrament happen or not? At the Council of Florence, the Church officially adopted the scholastic language of “matter and form” to indicate the two parts of any sacrament — the material things it uses and the words spoken in connection with them. [1] This Council taught: “All these Sacraments are accomplished by three elements, namely, by things as the matter; by words as the form; and by the person of the minister who confers the Sacrament with the intention of doing that which the Church does. If any of these is lacking, the Sacrament is not accomplished.” [2]

So, for example, in baptism the water is poured over the person’s head, while the minister speaks the words: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” St. Augustine wrote: “Take away the words, what then is the water but water? The words are added to the element, and the Sacrament emerges.” The washing with water in the name of the Trinity then accomplishes spiritually what washing with water does physically, namely, cleanses and refreshes. That is why we say a sacrament “effects what it signifies.” And we can go through each of the seven sacraments this way, seeing what the material thing used is, and what the words are, and what effects are signified by the combination of the matter and form. This is a very rich topic but for my purposes, we are looking at validity, that is, why baptism happens, and our answer is: the correct words were said, with the correct matter, by someone capable of performing the action, who intends to do what the Catholic Church does, even if he doesn’t fully understand what that might be.

Sometimes Catholic theology strikes observers as arcane and esoteric, but in point of fact, problems with validity arise from time to time in Church history, and we need to be equipped to deal with them. The notorious recent case of Fr. Matthew Hood comes to mind. Fr. Hood, serving as a priest in the archdiocese of Detroit, discovered early last August that he had been baptized by a deacon who used the formula “We baptize you,” which was judged invalid by a decision of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published on August 6th. As a result, Hood realized he had never been baptized, and therefore had never been confirmed or ordained to the priesthood, since each subsequent sacrament rests on the foundation of the preceding ones. He had to receive all these sacraments for the first time — and then deal with the messy fallout that resulted for other people who had depended on his ministry. For example, all the confirmations he had done, all the marriages, all the absolutions, all the last rites — all of these were absolutely null and utterly void. Do we have need for any further proof that the words we say and the actions we perform make a difference?

I mentioned a moment ago that the one who performs the sacrament has to have the right intention. Some Catholics get themselves tied up in knots about what intention is necessary, and they tend to exaggerate the explicitness and orthodoxy of the required intention. All that is required is that the priest have a virtual (not even an explicit) intention to perform a ritual of the Catholic Church by following the words and actions of the rite as given in the liturgical book. He does not need to have a good theological grasp of what he is doing, and he might even have an heretical understanding of it, as, unfortunately, a lot of clergy may have nowadays, due to their poor seminary training. He might be doing the sacrament for money, or for personal vanity, or to get promoted to a better position, etc. Still, if he thinks he is doing what the Church does — though he misunderstands it, or sins because of personal unworthiness — that intention suffices for validity.

If a priest’s theological competence, subjective motivations, or personal sanctity were necessary components of a valid sacrament, we would be thrown into constant doubts about whether the sacraments are efficacious, which is clearly not what Our Lord desires, or what He instituted. He planned better than that. As the Church teaches, Christ Himself is the primary agent in every sacrament: He is the one who baptizes, who confirms, who absolves, who transubstantiates. The priest is an intelligent instrument — intelligent, yes, which is why intentionality is required; but still an instrument, like a hammer or a saw. [3]

(That, by the way, is why the Detroit deacon’s baptisms were invalid, as Matthew Hood discovered to his horror: the deacon was saying “We baptize you,” referring to the Christian community, which precisely contradicts the fundamental truth: “It is I, Jesus Christ, who am baptizing you through my visible minister, who lends his voice and hands to Me.” Interestingly, the Byzantine tradition uses a completely different formula in the passive voice: “The servant of God, N., is baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Although so very different, this formula makes it clear that it is not the local community or any individual man by himself who incorporates a person into Christ; rather, this happens by God’s gracious action: “The servant of God is baptized,” with Christ implied as the one baptizing.)

To sum up this point, I will quote from theologian Roger Nutt:

[A] sacramental celebration is understood to be “valid” if it is executed by the proper minister in such a way that the sacrament is truly brought into being. Invalidity happens when the celebration is executed by an unauthorized minister or when the matter and form are so defective that the sign is not brought about. An invalid celebration indicates, precisely, that a sacrament was never brought into being and thus, absent the sacrament, none of the sacramental effects are conferred. [4]

Now, who gets to determine what counts for validity? Canon law states that “the sacraments of the New Testament were instituted by Christ the Lord and entrusted to the Church” [5] (indeed, this is a de fide dogma), and then in Canon 841 draws this conclusion: “Since the sacraments are the same for the whole Church and belong to the divine deposit, it is only for the supreme authority of the Church to approve or define the requirements for their validity.” Hence, we can say without any doubt that what counts as a valid sacramental rite, and the conditions for its performance, are solely the competence of the supreme authority of the Church, which means either the Pope by himself, or the Pope together with the college of bishops, as at an ecumenical council.

It is not possible, if we hold to the Catholic Faith, to call into question or to doubt the validity of a sacramental rite duly and correctly promulgated. This means, for example, that the Novus Ordo Missae, or the other postconciliar sacramental rites, insofar as they have been duly promulgated by the authority of the Church, are valid, no matter how much their deficiencies or their discontinuities with age-old Catholic tradition deserve to be critiqued, and no matter how much better the traditional rites may be. Validity is not about better and worse, more beautiful and less beautiful, more worthy or less worthy; it is a binary switch with two settings: on or off. Thus, either baptism happens, or it does not; either transubstantiation happens, or it does not.

But beyond saying whether something happened or not, we must also ask whether it happened rightly or correctly. That is what the other three qualities concern.

Licitness

Second, then, there is the licitness or legality of a sacrament. On this quality, I will again quote Roger Nutt, who says right after the passage I quoted a moment ago:

A licit celebration is one that is performed according to the prescribed rite of the Church, while an illicit celebration is one that directly deviates in some way from the prescribed rite. An illicit sacramental celebration does not vitiate the validity and therefore reality of the sacrament… [6]

Fr. Bernard Leeming says, more precisely:

Valid is often used as distinct from licit, which is said of a sacrament in whose administration and reception no law is broken; for unlawful administration of a sacrament does not ipso facto render it invalid. Thus a priest who is suspended or excommunicated can validly administer all sacraments except Penance, which requires jurisdiction, but he sins by so doing, if he acts contumaciously, and the faithful sin if they receive sacraments from him without some justifying reason. [7]

The term “licit” comes from the Latin verb licére, which means to allow. Licitness or liceity has to do with what is permitted, and, by extension, what is required or forbidden to Christians. In the domain of the sacraments and the liturgy, it primarily concerns the questions: Who is allowed to perform or to receive a given sacrament, and under what circumstances? If a priest or bishop in good standing, following all the conditions set forth in canon law, celebrates a liturgical rite according to the books promulgated by the supreme authority of the Church, saying the black and doing the red (in other words, reading just the texts that are printed, and following the rubrics without deviation), then he celebrates licitly. He has done, in other words, that which he had permission to do; that which he was required to do; and nothing that he is forbidden to do.

On the other hand, it is not licit for a Latin-rite priest to celebrate a Byzantine liturgy, unless he has first received canonical permission to do so; it is not licit for a laicized or degraded priest to offer Mass; it is not licit for a priest in a state of mortal sin to offer Mass; it is not licit to celebrate Mass with rice crackers and sake instead of wheat bread and wine from grapes (and that would also make it invalid); it is not licit to ad lib the opening prayer, or to play a John Lennon song in place of the psalm, or to read from a binder a Eucharistic Prayer written by liberation theologians from Nicaragua. As a matter of fact, any intentional deviation from the liturgical books, either in their texts or in their rubrics, is illicit, and makes the liturgy illicit to a greater or lesser extent. Moreover, it is not licit to receive Communion without having fasted for at least one hour beforehand; and, above all, it is not licit for anyone to receive Holy Communion in a state of mortal sin.

Two things will be immediately obvious from the foregoing list of examples.

First, some of these things are matters of mere canon law, that is, positive law created by the Church and changeable by her, while some things are matters of divine or natural law, which the Church can articulate, but does not originate and therefore can never alter. [8] The rule that we must fast for a certain period of time before Communion is a positive ecclesiastical law that can change and has changed a lot; not very long ago, the requirement was three hours (which in many ways would be much better), and not long before that, the rule was to fast from midnight onwards. But the rule that we must — so far as we can ascertain by examining our consciences — be in a state of grace in order to receive Communion is a matter of divine law, which is clear from chapter 11 of St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, where he says that someone who eats the Body of Christ unworthily eats damnation, and that a man should examine his conscience accordingly. No council or pope could ever change this rule.

Second, the Church today, at least in Western nations, is in grave trouble, since the vast majority of liturgies are illicit in one way or another; both ministers and recipients of sacraments have become habituated to illicitness. The crisis in the Church is, as Joseph Ratzinger said, in large part caused by the crisis in the liturgy.

The main point with the category of licitness (or liceity, as some prefer to call it) is that the sacred liturgy or divine worship, and with it, our sanctification by the mysteries of Christ, is a communal, ecclesial, hierarchical activity. Christ entrusted the work and the means of sanctification to His Church, and therefore, to her authorized heads. It is not something “between Jesus and me,” as our individualistic, atomistic age might think of it, a matter of convenience or personal choice, but rather, something between Christ and the Church, into which we are privileged to be inserted, as recipients and subordinates. Back in 2004, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments issued an instruction called Redemptionis Sacramentum, which addressed many of the most common liturgical problems and abuses of the Novus Ordo. In words that are of universal application, the document eloquently says:

The Mystery of the Eucharist “is too great for anyone to permit himself to treat it according to his own whim, so that its sacredness and its universal ordering would be obscured.” On the contrary, anyone who acts thus by giving free reign to his own inclinations, even if he is a Priest, injures the substantial unity of the Roman Rite, which ought to be vigorously preserved, and becomes responsible for actions that are in no way consistent with the hunger and thirst for the living God that is experienced by the people today. Nor do such actions serve authentic pastoral care or proper liturgical renewal; instead, they deprive Christ’s faithful of their patrimony and their heritage. For arbitrary actions are not conducive to true renewal, but are detrimental to the right of Christ’s faithful to a liturgical celebration that is an expression of the Church’s life in accordance with her tradition and discipline. In the end, they introduce elements of distortion and disharmony into the very celebration of the Eucharist, which is oriented in its own lofty way and by its very nature to signifying and wondrously bringing about the communion of divine life and the unity of the People of God. The result is uncertainty in matters of doctrine, perplexity and scandal on the part of the People of God, and, almost as a necessary consequence, vigorous opposition, all of which greatly confuse and sadden many of Christ’s faithful...
          On the contrary, it is the right of all of Christ’s faithful that the Liturgy, and in particular the celebration of Holy Mass, should truly be as the Church wishes, according to her stipulations as prescribed in the liturgical books and in the other laws and norms. Likewise, the Catholic people have the right that the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass should be celebrated for them in an integral manner, according to the entire doctrine of the Church’s Magisterium. [9]

The same document says later on:

In an altogether particular manner, let everyone do all that is in their power to ensure that the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist will be protected from any and every irreverence or distortion and that all abuses be thoroughly corrected. This is a most serious duty incumbent upon each and every one, and all are bound to carry it out without any favoritism. [10]

Sadly, Redemptionis Sacramentum seems to have gone to that special place in the sky, or over the seas, or under the earth, where all unwelcome Vatican documents go for their eternal rest, and where it has been forgotten like the unremembered dead. In the current COVID-19 situation, we have seen how readily bishops and priests, in their frenzy to avoid contamination with or transmission of the virus, are violating liturgical law in the most scandalous ways. In fact, Dr. Joseph Shaw makes a very important point here about clergy who are willing to experiment with or manipulate the liturgy:

The reason they feel free to play fast and loose with the liturgy is not because they feel strongly about sacramental validity and don’t care about anything else, but because they don’t care very much about sacramental validity either. They may be influenced by the idea that bishops and the Holy See feel strongly about validity, and they may allow us to comfort ourselves with the thought, when it is possible, that the sacrament was in this or that case valid. But if they really cared about validity, they would take the liturgy seriously, and that is something they are manifestly not doing.
          Liturgical abuses are an offense against God, as the abuse of something holy. They are also an offense against the faithful, whose spiritual engagement in the liturgy is impeded. Again, they are an offense against our Lord, who instituted the sacraments for our salvation, and [against] Holy Mother Church, who has surrounded them with ceremonies and texts intended to give God glory and to assist us in our participation. Finally, they are an offense against the priesthood itself, which should protect the liturgy from profanation, and whose function is to provide it to others for the good of souls.

The mention of “ceremonies and texts intended to give God glory and to assist us in our participation” is a perfect segue to the third quality, fittingness.

Fittingness

Consider the following statement: “All that matters at Mass is that Jesus is present; everything else is secondary.” Or, more succinctly, “the Mass is the Mass.” Undoubtedly it matters a great deal that Jesus is present, for otherwise we are eating no more than ordinary food. But the liturgy has a greater purpose than putting on a meal for us, and even Our Lord’s presence has a greater scope and purpose than sacramental communion. The Mass is the solemn, public, formal act of adoration, thanksgiving, and supplication offered by Christ the High Priest to the Father, and by His entire Mystical Body in union with Him. It is the foremost act of the virtue of religion, by which we offer to God a sacrifice of praise worthy of His glory. It is the chief expression of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. It is the kingdom of heaven breaking into our earthly time and space. It is the nuptial feast of the King of Kings. It is the recapitulation of the entire created universe in its Alpha and Omega.

Because it is all these things, the Church down through the ages has spared no effort and no expense to augment the beauty and elevate the solemnity of her liturgical rites. As John Paul II rightly said: “Like the woman who anointed Jesus in Bethany, the Church has feared no ‘extravagance,’ devoting the best of her resources to expressing her wonder and adoration before the unsurpassable gift of the Eucharist.” [11] So while it may be true that the only things necessary for a valid Mass in the Roman Rite are unleavened bread made from wheat and wine made from grapes, a priest, and the words of consecration, to see this as sufficient for the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass would betray a reductive, minimalist, and parsimonious view of things. Glorifying God and sanctifying our souls cannot be detached from the fittingness of the worship we offer Him. What the Council of Trent declares about the Roman Canon can be applied more generally to the whole of the Church’s liturgical life:

Since it is fitting that holy things be administered in a holy manner, and of all things this sacrifice is the most holy, the Catholic Church, to the end that it might be worthily and reverently offered and received, instituted many centuries ago the holy canon, which is so free from error that it contains nothing that does not in the highest degree savor of a certain holiness and piety and raise up to God the minds of those who offer. For it consists partly of the very words of the Lord, partly of the traditions of the Apostles, and also of pious regulations of holy pontiffs.

The essence of the Church’s liturgy is simple: it is precontained in the Heart of Christ, our Eternal High Priest, where all worthy worship perpetually exists. But the “clothing” of that worship is of decisive importance to us, who interact with Our Lord through His visible Body, the Church, and her visible rites. How these rites are structured, performed, and participated in will inevitably influence our understanding of the mysteries of the Faith and our ability to live them out. The clothing draped over the body of our prayers is, if anything, of far greater importance than any clothing a human being puts on.

When someone is attracted to the traditional Latin liturgy for its beauty to the eye and to the ear, it is not because he is stuck on these things, but because these things coalesce around the reality, the Sacrifice of the Cross, and make it stand forth with a satisfying clarity. The sensible or perceptible qualities so harmonize with the nature of the mystery that the result is the splendor of the truth. For men as body-soul composites, for Christians as disciples of the Word-made-flesh, there must be both elements: the truth and the splendor. Dom Gerard Calvet offers the perfect commentary:

One enters the Church by two doors: the door of the intelligence and the door of beauty. The narrow door...is that of intelligence; it is open to intellectuals and scholars. The wider door is that of beauty. The Church in her impenetrable mystery...has need of an earthly epiphany accessible to all: this is the majesty of her temples, the splendour of her liturgy and the sweetness of her chants.
          Take a group of Japanese tourists visiting Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. They look at the height of the stained-glass windows, the harmony of the proportions. Suppose that at that moment, sacred ministers dressed in orphried velvet copes enter in procession for solemn Vespers. The visitors watch in silence; they are entranced: beauty has opened its doors to them. Now the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas and Notre Dame in Paris are products of the same era. They say the same thing. But who among the visitors has read the Summa of St. Thomas? The same phenomenon is found at all levels. The tourists who visit the Acropolis in Athens are confronted with a civilisation of beauty. But who among them can understand Aristotle?
          And so it is with the beauty of the liturgy. More than anything else it deserves to be called the splendour of the truth. It opens to the small and the great alike the treasures of its magnificence: the beauty of psalmody, sacred chants and texts, candles, harmony of movement and dignity of bearing. With sovereign art the liturgy exercises a truly seductive influence on souls, whom it touches directly, even before the spirit perceives its influence. [12]

For this very reason — that the externals are meant to tell us something about the reality to which they are in service, and draw us towards it — we must take care that they harmonize, that the outward aspect does not openly or subtly contradict the inward. It would be unfitting to put a king’s robes on a pauper, or a gold ring in a pig’s snout: there is discordance between the decoration and the thing decorated. The same holds in the other direction: a king does not wear dirty rags nor his horse a cheap saddle. Putting the king’s robes on the king, and bedecking his mount in regal fashion: this is dignum et justum. The surface should correspond to the thing’s nature and lead us directly into it. This is not to be “caught up in” the externals, but to be caught up by the externals into the inner meaning. [13]

In other words: although it is not necessary for validity or licitness that a liturgy should look and sound as if we are entering the realm of the transcendent God and that He is accomplishing something divine and transformative among us, it is nevertheless highly fitting or suitable that it be done in this manner. And, as a matter of fact, the whole history of the liturgy cannot be understood unless we have grasped this essential fact: nearly all of its development can be attributed to the demands of fittingness.

Nor should we be surprised at the role it plays. Fittingness or suitability — convenientia in the language of theologians — is one of the central concepts of dogmatic theology, as we can see in the writings of St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas. Convenientia is a kind of necessity, a necessity based on what is appropriate for a given situation, what is decorous, proper, harmonious, corresponding to all the factors in play, or to the being about whom one is inquiring. When St. Thomas takes up the question “Must God create a world?,” he answers: “No, not by absolute necessity, for God, as infinite good, is self-sufficient and needs nothing else; but it is fitting that He share His goodness by causing finite good things to exist.” This immediately prompts another question: “Once God creates, must he create a rational or intellectual creature?” And the answer, again, is: “God is free to create any world He wishes; but it is fitting that He crown the order of creation with creatures that are as like to Him as possible, which means, beings possessed of intellect and will.” Much later on, when St. Thomas comes to the question: “Was the Incarnation necessary for the salvation of mankind?,” he again answers in this manner: “It was not simply necessary, since God could have saved man by willing it in His omnipotence. Nevertheless, it was most fitting that the Son of God become man, for many reasons: since man had sinned, it was fitting that man should make reparation; but only a sinless man of infinite merit could repair for the sin of Adam and all subsequent sins; moreover, man withdrew from spiritual goods to bodily goods, so it was right that he be restored to spiritual life by the bodily life of Christ; because the dignity of human nature consists in the image of God in the soul, it was appropriate for the Word, the perfect image of God, to restore that reflected image in man; nothing could show forth God’s extravagant love better than for His Son to lower Himself to human estate, suffer, and die in exchange for slaves; and so forth (Aquinas gives many such arguments for the fittingness of the Incarnation and the Passion). [14]

My point here is that, as the eminent Thomist Fr. Gilbert Narcisse maintains, convenientia is the central driving principle of Thomistic theology; without it, theology would be almost barren of development. So, too, the liturgy of the Church would have been barren had it not been for an ever-increasing awareness, prompted by the Holy Spirit, of the many ways in which the sacramental mysteries can be more fully expressed in words and gestures, in vestments and vessels, in music and architecture — in everything that pertains to the senses, the imagination, the memory, and the intellect’s capacity for symbolism. Fittingness is connected intimately with beauty, including moral beauty or honestas, a Latin word that refers to the condition of being reputable, honorable, upright, worthy.

Genealogy of Christ

Continue Reading this Article. . .

A Glimpse into Catholic Life in Ireland in the Early Sixties

Some weeks ago, a priest friend alerted me to the online archives of Radharc, “one of Ireland’s most important independent documentary production companies,” founded in 1959 and the producer of “over 400 documentaries which were screened on RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster, between 1961 and 1996.” My correspondent was particularly interested in the short films made from 1961 to 1966, with two priests, Fr Peter Dunn and Fr Desmond Forristal, as the hosts. It should be noted—and this is a matter of surprise especially for Americans—that it did  not seem strange in any way for a public film project to be run by priests and to center so closely on religious and cultural matters (which were often the same).

Several of these films would be fascinating to NLM readers, so I shall comment on my favorites. There are many more worth exploring at the Irish Film Institute Radharc archive. (As the videos are not on YouTube, only still shots can be inserted here.)

The New Ritual

For an absolutely fascinating glimpse into Catholic life at the time of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, watch the seven-minute film from 1962 about “The New Ritual.” “New,” at this time, refers to the Tridentine sacramental rites done partly in Latin and partly in English. The film speaks as if this modest step is a sufficient response to modern needs.

As regular readers will know, I’m opposed to having so much vernacular in the traditional rites of the Church of Rome, but no one can deny that if what the video shows had been the only step taken towards liturgical reform, the faithful wouldn’t have been thrown into disarray and there would be a great deal more peace and unity in the Church today. The traditional movement as we know it would not exist were it not for the flagrant overreaching of the Consilium and the accompanying absolutism of Paul VI.

Most interesting to me is the interview at the end with an Irish liturgist who says: “Some people want the Foremass [Mass of Catechumens] in English, but the rest of the Mass—especially the Canon, the heart of the Mass—will remain in Latin.” He seems quite sincere in his assertion. How many, at this time, could have imagined what would be happening only a few short years later? (On this point, I recommend William Riccio’s fine article “Back to the Future? No Thanks, I’ve Been There,” in which he recounts, inter alia: “We were told the Canon, that most untranslatable prayer, would never be in the vernacular because it is too steeped in meaning. In 1967, it was put in the vernacular.”)

Sick Calls

This four-minute video was made in 1962, when the traditional rite of the sacrament of extreme unction was still being used by everyone. Today it is used by communities like the FSSP and the ICRSS, and, I would suppose, by individual diocesan priests who are familiar with it.

What a remarkable glimpse into how sick calls used to be done — and, please God, how they can and should still be done today!

Blessing the Airplane Fleet

Made in 1962, this film tells the viewer about Aer Lingus, Ireland’s national airline. Each plane is named after an Irish saint—and after showing us lots of examples, the film gives a quick history of Irish missionaries of old. (As far as I know, the Aer Lingus airplanes have retained their saint names to the present.) We get a tour of the primitive instrumentation panel of a Boeing. We see a priest blessing the fleet with holy water, and a Sunday Mass conducted in the hangar. We get to see the prayer card (I’m not kidding) that used to be included in every seat of an Aer Lingus plane, and a view of nuns wearing habits one would never see today.

In general, the people flying on the planes as well as those seeing them off are dressed impeccably. One would not have dreamed of going out in public any other way.

The Village with the Most Vocations

Another remarkable film concerns a village in rural Ireland that had a long history of high numbers of priestly and religious vocations. A fascinating glimpse into Irish village life in 1962: there’s not even a hint of the collapse that would come later.

All the explanations given about why this village’s vocations flourished are quite similar to the reasons we might give today for the greater number of vocations among traditional Catholics: hard-working family life, the family Rosary, the cheerfulness of the sisters, and a relatively simple life. The sisters don’t put pressure on the girls; certainly no “vocations office,” “discernment retreats,” or baby-faced agents.

The sisters depicted in this 1962 film left for good in 2016, after 151 years. Seduced by the “spirit of the Council,” they had become “Eucharistic ministers” and Lord only knows what else. Corruptio optimi pessima.

People often say to traditionalists: “If Catholicism was so great before the Council, why did it fall apart so quickly?” And I reply: “How well do you know yourself? There but for the grace of God go I…” We don't have to pretend that there were no problems before the Council (and Ireland surely had its problems too) to know that things were a far sight better than they were afterwards, when the spirit of rebellion had taken hold and churchmen couldn't throw off the shackles of commandments, customs, and cultural heritage quickly enough. Things can fall apart rapidly when we let fallen human nature take the driver’s seat. Look at the history of Israel, God’s chosen people. Look at the Church in various periods of her checkered history. It’s not as if we should be shocked. Greatness is a daily moral and spiritual conquest, and it can fall to pieces in a matter of years, months, even days. These objectors might as well pose their question to Our Lord: “If you are the Son of God, why did one of your Apostles betray you, and the others run away?” It was not the fault of Our Lord; and neither was the (post)conciliar apostasy the fault of the Catholic tradition built up over the ages by the Holy Spirit, sent to the God-loving disciples in the one and only Pentecost of the Church, which lasts until the end of the ages.

Correlations between the Sacraments and the Readings for the Octave of Pentecost

Photo by Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P.

If I had a perfect memory, I would be able to remember where, in the vast forest of online postings, someone first pointed out this beautiful correlation. Whoever you are, thank you for sharing it to begin with, and giving me the opportunity to flesh it out here.

In the traditional Latin rite’s Octave of Pentecost — present since at least the late sixth century but tragically excised by a liturgical reform bent on hypersimplification, in spite of a professed love of ancient things — we find a sequence of readings that, by the sweet arrangement of the Holy Ghost, bring to mind each of the seven sacraments of the Church, through which, in this “Age of the Spirit” that stretches from Pentecost until the Parousia, the members of Christ are sanctified. Each year, the “Time after Pentecost” reminds us of the gifts and opportunities of our present condition, suspended, as it were, between creation ex nihilo, when only God’s righteousness reigned, and the creation of a new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness will be at home (cf. 2 Pet 3:13).

During the week of Whitsuntide, the Mass readings exalt the sacraments. In fact, multiple sacraments are exalted each day, in an intertwined manner that I will not here be able to expound fully (see Guéranger, Parsch, and Schuster).

In Monday’s Epistle (Acts 10:42–48), the Holy Spirit falls on all who heard Peter, and he commands that they receive baptism. The Gospel (John 3:16–21) is taken from the discourse where Jesus speaks to Nicodemus. the offertory antiphon continues the theme: “The Lord thundered from Heaven, and the Highest gave His voice; and the fountains of waters appeared, alleluia” (Ps 17:14,16).

Tuesday’s Lesson shows Peter and John laying hands on the baptized, strenghtening them in the Holy Ghost: confirmation. “In those days, when the apostles that were in Jerusalem had heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John; who, when they were come, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Ghost: for He was not as yet come upon any of them; but they were only baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid their hands upon them, and they received the Holy Ghost” (Acts 8:14–17).

Pentecost Ember Wednesday’s Gospel gives us part of the Bread of Life discourse (John 6:44–52), highlighting the Eucharist: “If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever; and the bread that I will give, is My flesh for the life of the world.”

Thursday’s Gospel (Luke 9:1–6) describes the authority of the priesthood to cast out devils, cure the sick, and to preach the Gospel: “At that time, Jesus calling together the twelve apostles gave them power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases. And He sent them to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick.”

In the Gospel of Pentecost Ember Friday, Christ forgives the sins of the man lowered down on a pallet (Luke 5:17–26), a power exercised in Confession. The verse of the Introit highlights the liberation won through the sacrament of penance: “In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped, let me never be put to confusion: deliver me in Thy justice, and rescue me” (Ps 70:23).

In the Gospel of Pentecost Ember Saturday, Christ is shown healing the sick (Luke 4:38–44), reminding us of the power of extreme unction. “At that time, Jesus rising up out of the synagogue, went into Simon's house: and Simon's wife's mother was taken with a great fever, and they besought Him for her. And standing over her He commanded the fever, and it left her: and, immediately rising, she ministered to them. And when the sun was down, all they that had any sick with divers diseases, brought them to Him: but He laying His hands on every one of them, healed them.” The offertory antiphon begins with the words: Domine, Deus salutis meae… O Lord, the God of my health/salvation.

But where is holy matrimony?

We might offer a practical and a speculative reason why marriage is not featured in this series. The practical reason is that there are only six days to work with: Monday through Saturday. The next Sunday is the feast of the Most Holy Trinity and, as it were, the octave day of Pentecost. (It is, however, interesting to note parallels between the Introit and Communion antiphons from Tobias on Trinity Sunday and the Introit from Tobias of the Nuptial Mass.)

The speculative reason is that marriage, uniquely among the sacraments, is already a natural institution existing from the time of creation, which Christ elevated to the dignity of a sacred sign that effects in the spouses what it signifies, namely, the union of Christ and His Church. Unlike matrimony, the other six sacraments, while they had prefigurations in the Old Law, had no proper existence before their institution by the Lord. They are altogether new — like the newness of the atonement that canceled out our debt, like the newness of the resurrection of Christ that abolished death in the new supernatural Head of the human race, the second Adam. The Pentecost octave stresses the newness of the gifts of Christ: His six “ex nihilo” sacraments, through which the grace and charity of the Holy Spirit is poured out into our hearts.

I had almost said: May we never take these sacraments for granted. But the strange Coronatide though which we have passed, and from which we are still suffering, has purged many Catholics of this fault: we do not take for granted what is taken away from us for a time. May that deprivation come to an end, and may our longing for these ineffable mysteries never end until we draw our last breath.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s website, SoundCloud page, and YouTube channel.

A little humor, courtesy of Dom Hubert van Zeller

How the Seven Sacraments “Christianize” Us

Rogier van der Weyden's Seven Sacraments Altarpiece (c. 1450)

In this month of July, dedicated to the mystery of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus, I wish to reflect on sacramental realism. For indeed the sacraments are as real, as tangible, as powerful, as cleansing, as the very lifeblood of the Savior pouring forth from His body, nailed to the Cross and opened with a lance.

For Aquinas the most basic function of the sacraments is to place man in vital contact with the crucified and risen Lord [1]; they are, in the words of Romanus Cessario, “graced instruments for restoring the image of God” [2] through assimilation to God’s Son, who is the Father’s perfect image and man’s formative exemplar. By virtue of the God-man’s sacrifice, each sacrament has power to originate, deepen, or repair a direct relationship between man and God, a communion of like-minded friends having a shared beatitude for its goal.

Each sacrament configures one to Christ in a specific way, according to a certain grace in the soul of Christ, connected with His deeds and sufferings on earth. This reference to the past may be seen in the sacraments as follows:

• The Eucharist brings us into contact with Christ in the state of bloody immolation, though the mode is unbloody. [3]
• Baptism unites us with Christ dying and rising.
• Confirmation unites us with Christ as descended upon by the Holy Spirit.
• Holy Orders fuses the candidate with Christ offering sacrifice.
• Matrimony conjoins spouses to Christ in the act of uniting to himself mankind and the Church.
• When the sick are anointed, it is Christ strengthening those who are struggling, he is the angel who visits them in their Gethsemane.
• The penitent sinner is made one with Christ efficaciously making satisfaction for us — the sinner is nailed to an invisible Cross where the Savior meets him, and breathes out peace upon him. [4]

In every case, it is Christ Himself, in His sacred humanity, in His eternal divinity, who acts directly upon the recipient; it is He who bestows the healing and elevating effects of grace through the sacramental signs administered by others. “The man who baptizes provides only exterior ministry,” writes Thomas, “but it is Christ who baptizes interiorly, who is able to use all men for whatever He wills” (ST III, q. 67, a. 5, ad 1). In another text the point is made quite forcefully:

It is evident that Christ Himself accomplishes all the Church’s sacraments: He it is who baptizes; He it is who forgives sins; He is the true priest, who offered Himself on the altar of the Cross, and by whose power His own Body is consecrated daily on the altar. And yet, because he was not to remain bodily present to all the faithful, He chose ministers, that through them He might give that same Body to the faithful. (SCG IV, ch. 76)

Thus, in and through the seven sacraments, Christians re-live mystically the life Christ lived when He dwelt among us full of grace and truth, and the risen life He is now living forever: we enter into His earthly ministry, His passion and death, His resurrection and ascension.

The sacraments derive their efficacy from the Word-made-flesh; each has its power and operation immediately from Jesus Christ, whose glorified humanity is the inseparable instrument, the predestined channel, through which the divine Word pours out grace into souls. When a human being, properly disposed, receives one of the seven sacraments, he is at that moment in mystical contact with the Person of the Savior, who pours out as much grace as the soul is ready to receive.

This mystical contact attains an incomparable fullness and immediacy in the Eucharist, which both symbolizes and accomplishes the intimate communion of the Savior with the members of his body. Here the sacramental encounter is no mere contact, but the context for an unreserved, mutual gift of self that can attain a unity and fecundity only distantly hinted at in human marriage.

Thomas’s uncompromising sacramental realism is in many ways astonishing. Without denying that they are social, symbolic celebrations for calling to mind important truths, Aquinas holds the sacraments to be, first and foremost, a real participation in Christ’s own actions, sufferings, and glory, for the sake of receiving into one’s being the effect of those actions, the fruit of those sufferings, the vision of that glory. As Gilles Emery phrases it: “They bear the historical event of the Passion of Jesus, whence they procure the fruit of grace in the present moment, while announcing the fulfillment whose seed they possess.” [5] For example, when asking whether a man is freed from all guilt through baptism, Aquinas responds:

Through baptism one is incorporated into Christ’s passion and death, according to Romans 6:8, “If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live together with Christ.” From which it is clear that Christ’s passion is communicated to every baptized person as a remedy, as though he himself had suffered and had died. Now Christ’s passion . . . is sufficient satisfaction for all the sins of all men. And so the one who is baptized is freed from the debt of all the punishment due to him for sins, as though he himself had sufficiently satisfied for his own sins. (ST III, q. 69, a. 2, emphasis added)

In baptism the death and resurrection of Christ becomes ours; it becomes our paschal mystery, the origin of a new life with Him. The effect is the same as if we, become unblemished victims, had hung on the Cross; as if we had suffered and died, though guiltless of all crime; as if we had risen again, forever beyond the reach of death and decay.

So much is this the case, believes Thomas, that it even dissolves the obligation of rendering the marriage debt in a certain case:

Now he who goes over to the religious life dies only a spiritual death, not a bodily death; and so, if the marriage be consummated, the husband cannot go over to religious life without his wife’s consent (whereas he can do so prior to there being a carnal joining, when there is only a spiritual joining).  But the one who undergoes baptism is even corporeally buried with Christ in death; and therefore he is freed from paying the marriage debt even after the marriage has been consummated. (In IV Sent. d. 39, q. 1, a. 4, ad 2)

This “as if” is not the als ob of Kantian philosophy — we must behave as if there is a God; we must view nature as if there is teleology; we must approach the beautiful as if beauty is an objective trait.  It is the mystical “as if” that means: we have really done and suffered these things because we have been joined, even identified, with the One who really did and suffered them. Being true man, Christ could act and undergo as a creature acts and undergoes; being true God, he can, in the power of the Spirit, make his accomplishments ours.  The phrase “as if” merely preserves the reverent distance of participant to source.

This “incorporation,” begun at baptism, is perfected by a man’s being united in the power of the Spirit to the Body of Christ — engrafted into His Mystical Body by way of His glorified Body shared in the Eucharist — that we may no longer live for ourselves, but for Him. The Eucharist is “the consummation of spiritual life, and the end of all the sacraments” (ST III, q. 73, a. 3), containing substantially the common spiritual good of the whole Church. It is “the sacrament of Christ’s passion in so far as a man is perfected in union with the Christ-who-suffered” (ST III, q. 73, a. 3, ad 3). [6]

The sacraments in fact simply Christianize us. Contrary to the heresy of Karl Rahner, no soul is “naturally” or “anonymously” Christian, as if one could be a Christian and not even know it. We need to receive, in faith, the gift of Christ’s life, His grace, His charity. The sacraments find us more or less pagan, more or less self-centered, and they evangelize and convert us to be centered on Christ, to have our center in Him. This means that a sacramental life, so far as the recipient’s experience is concerned, will not consist of satisfying (one might say, flattering) encounters between a well-defined self or subject and a securely-apprehended object. [7] Rather, it will be a mirror, at times bright, at times blurry, in which I am able to glimpse the Face of the One who seeks me out in love, and the unfolding of my life in relation to Him, in union with Him. “Sacraments are proportionate to faith, through which the truth is seen in a mirror and in an enigma” (ST III, q. 80, a. 2, ad 2).

When we come before the Lord at the end of our lives, may He recognize in us the beauty of His own features.

Johannes Hopffe, Distribution of Divine Graces by Means of the Catholic Church and the Sacraments (before 1615)

NOTES

[1] See Joseph J. Sikora, S.J., “Sacraments and Encounter,” in Theological Reflections of a Christian Philosopher (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 213–33.

[2] From his essay “Aquinas on Christian Salvation,” in Aquinas on Doctrine: A Critical Introduction, ed. T. Weinandy, D. Keating, and J. Yocum (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 129. See also the same author’s “The Sacramental Mediation of Divine Friendship and Communion,” Faith & Reason 27 (2002): 7–41.

[3] The Eucharist occupies so unique a place and enjoys such a primacy among the seven sacraments of the New Law that even the very term “sacrament” has to be regarded as analogous, with the Eucharist being the very locus of divinization and communion with the Savior, and the other sacraments streaming out from it and leading back to it.

[4] The phrases in quotation marks are taken from André-Charles Gigon, O.P., De Sacramentis in communi (Fribourg: Typographia Canisiana, 1945).

[5] Gilles Emery, O.P., “The Ecclesial Fruit of the Eucharist,” Nova et Vetera [English] 2 (2004): 43–60.

[6] For more on the Eucharist as containing Christus passus, see my article last week: “‘The Application of the Lord’s Passion to Us’: St Thomas on the Blessed Sacrament.”

[7] The experience, as such, may be empty and dry, or overfull and beyond words — like bodily intimacy, like evanescent recollection. But this is not the crux of the matter. The desire to equate faith or love with a subjective “experience” of God, and the consequent tendency to spurn a God who eludes experience, is one of the chief temptations a Christian has to overcome if he is to get beyond “self-cultivationism” into the maturity of spiritual marriage.

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for events, articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen).