Sacred Actions In Modern Catholicism

This article traces the development of a Catholic view of the sacraments since the medieval period. This development shows a great respect for the tradition which has shaped it, but also shows new emphases offered in response to the Reformation and later theological thought.

In the later Middle Ages (from the twelfth century onward) Aristotelian philosophy provided the foundation for scholastic theology as it sought to express in logical terms how divine initiative and human response come together in the sacraments. Although both Catholic and Protestant Reformers sought in different ways to reformulate answers to this problem, their method remained, by and large, scholastic and logical. In some aspects, the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1963) returned to the New Testament and patristic understanding of the mystery of Christ's sacred action that had characterized medieval theology up to the rise of scholasticism. In making an account of sacramental action, that is, the relationship of the saving activity of Christ in his once-for-all death to the human response of Christians in the celebration of the sacraments, both the Roman Catholic and Reformation churches have suffered from the limitations of (1) medieval cosmology and (2) scholastic philosophy, as well as from a (3) literalist understanding of the Scriptures and (4) negative anthropology. A Neoplatonic cosmology or worldview is characterized by the assumptions that the beings of the spiritual world are ranked on a scale of being in the shape of a pyramid, with God at the pinnacle, and that the material world is patterned on the spiritual world. With the reintroduction of Aristotelian philosophy to the European continent in the eleventh century, categories such as cause and effect as well as matter and form served to provide philosophical language for theology and, at the same time, to reinforce the hierarchical cosmology. In addition, a literalist interpretation of the Scriptures, especially of the Ascension, led to a rather physical, localized image of Christ as "?seated at the right hand of the Father,?" distant from human history. These factors, as well as a very negative evaluation of human nature, provided the difficult task of explaining sacramental action, that is, how the divine initiative and Christian response of faith come together in the sacraments' celebration. It was asked: If God acts in sovereign freedom, and if Christ, having died once-for-all, is situated at the right hand of God, how can the graces of that saving death be related to sinful human nature in baptism, the Eucharist, and the other sacraments? In brief, medieval scholastic theology responded: God in Christ is the primary cause of sacramental grace; the minister of the sacraments is the instrumental cause; the water, oil, bread, wine, etc., is the matter of the sacraments; and the word formula by which the meaning of the sacrament is determined is the form of the sacraments. Hence, the sacraments are the "?efficacious signs of grace?": they effect (bring about) the sanctifying grace (a share in the holy life of God), which they signify (mean), in the soul of the recipient ex opere operato (from the work worked), that is, in virtue Christ's saving work on the cross, so long as the recipient is properly disposed to receive the gift of grace. Sacramental action was, therefore, understood to be the consequence of divine initiative in the soul of a person who responds in trust with a passive faith. For a complex of reasons—the use of Latin; general illiteracy, even among the clergy; the extreme emphasis on the sovereign activity of God in relation to the passive faith of sinful humanity; poor catechesis and preaching; and undeniable corruption among some of the clergy—this synthesis was poorly understood and practiced. Such misunderstanding led to the sense that the grace of God was somehow automatically conferred (cheap grace), and that God could be manipulated by human actions (works righteousness), so long as the proper matter and form were used. Martin Luther and John Calvin knew this corrupt form of scholastic theology and practice, rather than the actual work of Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae, Part 3; it was this corrupted sacramental practice that the Reformers justifiably accused as implying the granting of "?cheap grace?" without personal commitment and the justifying of humans before God on the basis of "?human works.?" Many sixteenth-century reformers, such as Erasmus, called the church to its biblical foundations. However, the Protestant Reformers taught that only those sacraments which (they assumed to) have biblical warrant—baptism and the Lord's Supper—were to be kept; all others were said to be of merely ecclesiastical origin. Along with all other theologians of the time, the Reformers continued to assert the sovereign freedom of God and to reaffirm the importance of trusting faith in God's promises. However, in contrast to the sixteenth-century church's teaching that human nature is deeply weakened by Adam's sin, the Reformers retrieved a doctrine of human nature's total depravity from the writings of St. Augustine. This combination of factors—a pyramidal worldview, the reaction to and entrapment in a philosophical system, a literalist interpretation of the Ascension, the (recent) limiting of the sacraments to those specifically mentioned in the New Testament, and the doctrine of the total depravity of human nature—had powerful consequences for the understanding of sacramental action and its expression in liturgical celebration among Reformation churches. Hence, even though Luther and Calvin had called for the weekly Sunday celebration of the Eucharist (Mass), the awesome sense of being depraved before God led to the reduction of Sunday worship to a preaching and word service with only an occasional celebration of the Lord's Supper, if at all, even during the Reformers' lifetimes. In this polemical situation, the bishops at the Council of Trent reasserted the number of the principal sacraments of the church as instituted by Christ and the relation between the seven sacraments and the bestowal of sacramental grace, that is, the special participation of the grace of Christ, the head of the church, according to the purpose of each sacrament. The bishops, like the Protestant Reformers, were also laboring with some of the same assumptions: Christ's saving act on the cross is the once-for-all source of salvation; and Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father. However, Trent understood "?instituted by Christ?" more broadly to mean "?instituted by the will of Christ in the church,?" and maintained that human nature is weakened rather than totally depraved. The documents of the Council of Trent indicate that there were many abuses in pastoral practice because of poor understanding of theology. Therefore, the council mandated the correction of abuses and the reform of the clergy. Clearly, Trent had no intention of saying everything that could be said about sacraments. Indeed, it does not represent the best of the synthesis of Thomas. Yet its tentative doctrinal synthesis became the basis for later explanations of sacramental action, especially the Eucharist, among Catholic theologians until the twentieth century. An example of the theology of the relation of Christ's saving death to Christians is present in the following: "?For the Victim [Christ] is one and the same, the same [victim] now offering by the ministry of the priests, who then offered himself on the Cross, the manner alone of the offering being different. The fruits (i.e., graces) indeed of which oblation … are received?" (Session 22, September 17, 1562). Ironically, both the Protestant Reformers and the participants in the Council of Trent were operating from within the same worldview. On the one hand, the Protestant Reformers rejected the living tradition of the church as a source of revelation and asserted the importance of personal faith and the total depravity of human nature. On the other hand, the Council of Trent seemed simply to restate the accumulated tradition up to that point in history, but without much theological explanation. The results of historical studies in Scripture and liturgy are moving all the churches to acknowledge the factors which led to the sixteenth-century division. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (1963), par. 1–20, expresses in brief the retrieval of a New Testament theology of baptism into Christ's sacrifice, and hence, of the church as the primary presence of Christ, whose purpose is to proclaim the kingdom of God in history. This theology clearly asserts the sovereign initiative of God in the sacraments, but better accounts for the free human response of Christian faith: When the church gathers to celebrate the liturgy of the sacraments, it is Christ who is acting in their midst by the power of the Spirit to the glory of God. The publication Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (1982) by the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches witnesses to the growing convergence between the Western Christian churches.