As will be evident from references to what was happening in the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council, the piece is somewhat dated. At the same time, however, given the resurgence of scholastic theology in the Catechism, and given the restrictions on worship proposed in Liturgiam Authenticam, the issues the piece addresses are as alive today as they were then.

I believed what I wrote then, and I still believe it today. My hope in publishing this conclusion is that some will find it not only believable but also helpful.

A personal conclusion

To make a journey is one thing. To make the same journey over and over again is quite another, especially when the trip is through 2,000 or more years of history. After a while certain features of the terrain become familiar, and some general conclusions begin to suggest themselves. Particularly if one intends to live in a sacramental land, to remain a member of a sacramental religion like Catholicism, it helps to learn from the past in planning for the future.

We have followed the seven Catholic sacraments and sacramental theology through three major periods of history and into a fourth, which is the one that is now beginning. We have seen how in the patristic period Christians had a number of ritual practices that were individually and socially quite effective. Participants and observers took note of them and wrote about their experiential and behavioral effects on people: Their lives were changed through sacramental initiation, they were reconciled with the community through a lengthy ritual of repentance, they experienced a divine presence and unity during the liturgy, they were initiated into a holy priesthood by ordination, and so on. However, the ecclesiastical writers of that age discussed the meaning and effectiveness of their rituals not in concrete and experiential terms but primarily in abstract and metaphysical terms. In the medieval period, this way of speaking about sacramental rites and their effectiveness remained, and the experiential origins of such statements tended to be overlooked. During the early and high scholastic periods, a number of Catholic thinkers did use their personal and social experience as a basis for what they said about the sacraments, but in the time of later scholasticism, the experiential basis of theological reflection was generally lost. In the modern period, partly as a defensive reaction against Protestant attacks, the objective and metaphysical way of speaking about the sacraments was solidified by the Council of Trent and sanctioned as Catholic dogma. It lasted relatively unchanged until the 20th century.

Today, theologians who are aware of the connection between experience and ideas have attempted to retrieve the historical origins of traditional sacramental theology. They have also tried to restore an experiential basis to statements about sacramental effects, and to some extent they have been successful. Yet in one respect it seems they have not, for by and large they continue to use the patristic and medieval mode of expression that speaks of sacraments as having certain spiritual effects or, to use a more contemporary jargon, as symbolizing certain sacred realities.

Undoubtedly this is true in some ways and in some cases, especially for sacraments that are transition rituals. Baptism always makes a person a member of the church, the wedding ceremony always makes a couple married and ordination always makes a man a priest. By and large the social effects of these sacraments remain. But their personal effects, at least the rather personal effects that are often attributed to them, sometimes do not happen. Baptism does not always make someone a participating member of an actively Christian community, marriage is not always the start of a lifetime of union in love and ordination is not always the start of a lifetime of dedicated ministry. The same is true in an analogous way of the sacraments that are primarily intensification rituals. Confirmation does not necessarily strengthen a person’s Christian commitment, penance does not necessarily awaken repentance and effect reconciliation, anointing does not necessarily cause physical or spiritual healing and the Eucharist does not necessarily bring a sense of the presence of Christ or an awareness of spiritual community.

The same fault can be found with speaking of sacraments as symbols of sacred realities. In an abstract sense one can speak of the church as the people of God, as a community of faith, as followers of Christ and so on. And in that same abstract sense one can regard the sacraments as rites which symbolize what the Catholic Church is or believes in — that it is a redeemed community, a Spirit-filled community, a healing community, a sharing community and so on. Yet once again what is true in the abstract is not always true in the concrete. It is not always true of this particular celebration in this particular congregation right now. Abstractly the rite is a symbol but concretely it can fail to symbolize. For sacraments concretely symbolize what they abstractly stand for only when in the course of their performance they make what they represent experientially and personally present in sacred space and time.

ML

Joseph Martos is director of the Russell Institute of Religion and Ministry at Spalding University in Louisville, Ky. He teaches courses in theology and religious studies and lectures throughout the United States. His revised work, Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to the Sacraments in the Catholic Church (Liguori), was published in 2001.