Tag Archives: sacraments

guest presentation

Why Our Sacraments Don’t Connect

Leave a comment

Twice Removed:

 

Why Our Sacraments Often Don’t Connect With Real Life

 

By Joseph Martos

(Published in National Catholic Reporter vol. 52, no. 9, 2016)

We are told that in baptism we receive new life in Christ, yet baptized babies don’t seem to be any different from unbaptized ones.

We are told that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life, yet we often don’t get much out of the mass, and it is rarely a peak moment in our week.

Why is this?

For years I have been sifting through twenty centuries of church history and Catholic theology, and I have made some important discoveries.

Early Christianity

The first is that in the first two centuries of Christianity, theology was based in experience. Words that were later taken to refer to things that are outside the realm of experience were originally attempts to talk about things that the followers of Jesus were experiencing.

For example, when Paul wrote about justification by faith, he was not talking about getting right with God by believing in Christ, but about getting your life straightened out by trusting that what Jesus taught is true. When the Book of Acts talks about being saved through baptism, it does not mean washing away sin by going through a ritual, but it means being rescued from selfishness by being immersed in a caring community. When you read an English translation that mentions the Holy Spirit, the original Greek is talking about a spirit of godliness or goodness that leads people to care about and take care of others.

Scholars who study other early documents like “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles” (often called the Didache for short, from the Greek word for teaching) are finding that these writings were also attempts to spell out in words what the followers of Jesus were experiencing in their lives. But in the third century, things began to change.

You could say that, over time, the experience behind the early writings got forgotten, but the words remained. The writings were recognized as precious, and they got called sacred scriptures. Even the Didache appeared in some early lists of sacred scriptures.

Christian intellectuals in the third century, sometimes called apologists, tried to explain their faith to people in the wider pagan world who suspected that the followers of Jesus were members of a dangerous cult. In response, one apologist name Justin compared the Christian community meal to a temple sacrifice, where pagans shared food in the presence of their god, to show that Christians were religious even though they did not worship in temples. But other apologists began to talk about their faith as a set of beliefs rather than as a way of living. The words were becoming disconnected from the experiences that gave rise to them.

In the fourth century, Constantine wanted to unify the sprawling Roman Empire with a single religion, so he legalized and promoted Christianity. When Christians began to travel freely throughout the empire, they discovered that people in different regions had different theologies. Some believed that Jesus was a prophet, others that he was God, others that he was both human and divine. Instead of uniting Constantine’s empire, Christians started arguing with one another and dividing it even further.

To address the problem, Constantine ordered all the bishops to his villa in Nicaea, and he forced them to stay there until they produced a document they could all agree on. They came up with the Nicene Creed, a statement of belief that said nothing about the Jesus way of living but only about divine beings and the earthly church. The first removal of theology from the experience of Christian living was complete.

The Middle Ages

The attempt of the emperors to preserve the empire failed, and in the fifth century the western or European half of it fell to barbarian invaders from the north. The so-called Dark Ages lasted until the tenth century. Theological thinking came to a halt while people struggled to survive.

Church life, on the contrary, evolved and flourished. The elaborate eucharistic liturgy got pared down to a mass that could be said by missionaries who carried the faith to the tribes that were settling on the continent, and it was called a sacrifice even though no one remembered why. Baptism became a short rite that was performed on babies in a church or adult converts in a river. Confirmation could be given by a bishop on horseback to children who were held up for him to touch. Private confession was introduced by monks for people who needed assurance of God’s forgiveness. Weddings became church ceremonies because there needed to be a public record of marriages. Ordination became a series of rites for apprentices who were learning how to be clerics as they ascended through a series of holy orders. Anointing of the sick began as a ministry to people who were ill, but in the absence of modern medicine it became the last anointing called extreme unction.

By the eleventh century, the chaos had subsided. The weather got warmer, farming flourished, commerce expanded, towns grew into cities, cathedrals were built, and schools were founded. Monks turned their attention from copying ancient manuscripts to studying them. Philosophy and theology were reborn.

Among other things, the schoolmen of the high Middle Ages turned their attention to religious rituals, and especially to those called sacraments. How did bread and wine turn into the body and blood of Christ? Why could baptism and confirmation be received only once? How did the sacraments of penance and extreme unction work? What were the different powers of priests and bishops? Why was the bond of marriage indissoluble? Like Christian writers in the first and second centuries, the schoolmen reflected on their experience to describe and explain the life in medieval Christendom.

The schoolmen did not realize, however, that much of their theological language was already somewhat removed from life, and so they thought that salvation meant going to heaven, that the gifts of the Holy Spirit were not experienced, that sins were remitted even if they were committed again, that the bond of marriage was invisible, that priestly powers were unrelated to priestly ministry, and that extreme unction could be received by someone who was unconscious. They saw nothing amiss in a mass that was performed by a priest using words that the people could not hear, much less understand, and who paid attention only when a bell was rung.

The Modern Centuries

In many ways, sacramental ministry devolved into sacramental magic in the late Middle Ages, but the church’s leadership rejected repeated calls for reform until the sixteenth century, by which time half of Europe had turned Protestant. The Council of Trent reformed the sacramental system, eliminating the most superstitious practices, insisting that bishops be true shepherds of their flocks and that priests be trained in seminaries. From the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Catholic sacramental practice and Catholic sacramental theology mirrored one another.

The baptismal and priestly characters explained why Catholics never left the church and why priests never left the ministry. The Eucharist was surrounded by great ceremony, elevated at mass and ensconced in a monstrance for exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, and received only rarely, usually after a sincere confession of sins to a priest. The indissoluble bond of marriage explained why Catholics never divorced. Confirmation and extreme unction did not have very visible effects, but Catholics trusted that the former was good to receive in adolescence and the latter was good to receive before dying. The Catholic Church remained medieval in form and thought well into the twentieth century.

Vatican II and After

At the Second Vatican Council, the world’s Catholic bishops called for an updating – aggiornamento in Italian – of the Church’s sacramental practices. Historians and liturgists reached back past the Middle Ages to retrieve earlier forms of the mass and other rites that had gotten lost during the Dark Ages – things like praying in the language of the people, receiving communion in the forms of both bread and wine, rethinking the relation between sin and confession, and returning anointing to the context of ministry to the sick.

Unexpectedly, the unity of practice and theology began to dissolve. People stopped going to confession regularly. Priests began leaving the priesthood and the number of seminarians dwindled. Married Catholics started divorcing in greater numbers and even remarrying without waiting for an annulment. The primary effect of confirmation seemed to be dropping out of church. Even baptism was no guarantee that people would remain Catholics or even Christians, as those who left the Church sometimes became agnostics or atheists, Jews or Muslims.

Alarmed by this apparent defection from the faith, popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI attempted to restore what was lost, insisting on strict adherence to ecclesiastical rules, affirming traditional doctrines, stifling dissent, and denying any further developments in sacramental practice such as allowing deacons to anoint the sick or allowing priests to marry. But the traditional doctrines no longer match Catholics’ contemporary experience of church membership, marriage and ministry, not to mention their sense of sin and their experience of illness. Even Catholic worship feels different from the way it did in the days of the Latin mass and Gregorian chant, and the previously strong sense of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is hard to recapture. As happened in the third century, there is a growing gap between theology and experience, only this time the theology is twice removed from life. Official teachings about the mass and sacraments are not only disconnected from people’s everyday lives, but they are also often disconnected from people’s experience of worship. As noted earlier, for many people the liturgy is not the main source of their spiritual nourishment nor the high point of their week.

Around the time of the Council, Catholic thinkers like Edward Schillebeeckx in France, Karl Rahner in Germany, Bernard Cooke in the United States and Louis-Marie Chauvet in France tried to reinterpret the sacraments in more contemporary ways. Fifty years later, however, their work is not given much attention because it suffered from a fatal flaw. Instead of reflecting on the experience of ritual worship, as was done in the early centuries and in the Middle Ages, they reflected on the church’s sacramental doctrines and tried to translate them into thought categories derived from existentialism and phenomenology, the psychology and sociology of religion, and even postmodern philosophy. By being tied to medieval doctrines, however, these theologians found themselves having to explain why baptism is permanent, how confirmation gives spiritual strength, why confession is needed, how anointing benefits the sick, why marriage is indissoluble, and why the priesthood is forever. But these ideas no longer correspond to the world inhabited by most Catholics, so contemporary theologies are just as removed from real life as the scholastic theology they had hoped to replace.

Is there a way out of the current confusion? There is, but it is neither a dogmatic reassertion of the past nor a freefall into cultural relativism. We need to rediscover what is essential to the Christian way of life, reinvent ways to ritualize that, and reformulate what those rituals mean in terms that are faithful both to the teachings of Jesus and to the experience of living in accordance with them.

=================================================
Do you like what you’ve read? If so, please say a few words to Dr. Martos below.  Maybe copy and post your favorite line.
Do you not like what you’ve read? If so, please say a few words about your discomfort.  Maybe copy and post your most objectionable line.

guest presentation

How We Got Into This Mess

1 Comment

How We Got Into This Mess

Why Sacraments Don’t Work the Way They Are Supposed To

A guest presentation by Dr. Joseph Martos

St. Robert Bellarmine Church, Redford, Michigan

December 13, 2016

Let me begin by thanking Bishop Gumbleton and the organizers of this series of talks that address the elephants in the living room, that is, the issues that everyone recognizes but no one is willing to talk about.

As I started thinking about what to say in this talk, I was reminded of the story about the young monk who was sent by his abbot to search the monastery archives for the oldest documents, the ones that talked about the reason for the founding of the monastery.

After spending several weeks in the basement archives, the young monk bounded up the stairs one day and asked to see the abbot right way.

“Why all the excitement?” asked the abbot.

Holding up a faded piece of parchment, the young man pointed to a sentence in [the] monastery’s original rule, and said excitedly, “The word is ‘celebrate’!”

All along, the monks had thought the word was “celebate.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Every now and then, I feel like the young monk in that story.

In a little while, you’ll see why, but for now, let me say that by digging through the historical records, I’ve discovered that many of the ideas we take for granted are different from the ideas that we find when we dig into the early history of the sacraments.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I never intended to become an expert on sacraments, but when I got my first college teaching job many years ago, I was asked to teach the course on sacraments because no one else wanted to tackle that subject. This was right after Vatican II, when everything in the Catholic Church was in flux, and there were great differences between the traditional Church doctrines and what some of the younger theologians were saying—young theologians like Yves Congar, Hans Kung, and Edward Schillebeeckx. I felt that a safe approach to the course would be a historical approach because no one could argue with historical facts.

At that time, there were a number of very scholarly treatments on    the history of baptism, the history of the mass, the history of penance, and so on. But no one had taken all that information and collected it into a single book, and since I needed a book to teach the course, I wrote Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church.

A year later, I was asked to write an introductory volume for a set of seven books on the sacraments. That book has been revised and expanded, and it is now available as The Catholic Sacraments: An Interdisciplinary and Interactive Study. There is a website that goes along with it for the interactive part.

I wrote the second book because I felt, even thirty years ago, that the Catholic Church needed a more up to date approach to its sacraments. Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic theologians were fine in their day, but we needed a more modern approach for a modern church.

One clue that I had about why we needed a better way of understanding sacraments is that only Catholics talk about sacraments as being given and received. Protestants don’t talk that way, and the Orthodox don’t talk that way even though the Orthodox tradition is as old as the Catholic tradition. Except for when they talk about receiving communion or receiving the Eucharist, no one but Catholics use the language of administering and receiving sacraments.

When I was doing the research for Doors to the Sacred, I could tell when in church history that manner of speaking became rather common. But I could not really tell why it had become common for us Catholics to talk about administering and receiving the sacraments. The priest or bishop, of course, is the usual minister, but the other person in the sacramental rite is always referred to as the recipient of the sacrament. Thus we talk about receiving the sacrament of baptism, receiving the sacrament of confirmation, receiving the sacrament of penance, and so on.

When I was doing the research for my latest book, I was finally able to figure out where that language had come from. This is because in the last ten years or so, most of the important ancient and medieval texts have been digitized and stored on CD-ROMs, which are CDs with documents stored on them instead of music. Using these digitized texts, it is now possible to do word searches in the writings of the fathers of the church—people like Tertullian and Ambrose and Augustine—as well as in the writings of medieval theologians—people like Hugh of St. Victor, Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas.

When you do these word searches, and you look at how words like baptism, administer, receive, confirmation, penance, ordain, and so on, are used you can see how, over the course of time, the usage of the word changed. For example, Tertullian, a father of the church living in the second century, was the first to use the phrase, “sacrament of baptism.” In his understanding, a sacrament is a sacred sign, or a sign of something sacred, as it is for us, but it is clear from the way he used the words, that when he talked about the sacrament of baptism, what he was referring to was water. The water that was used in the baptismal ritual was a sign of the spiritual change that was taking place when a person joined the Church and received the Holy Spirit. Some two centuries later, St. Augustine wrote about the sacrament of baptism, but what he was referring to was an indelible sign that was impressed on the soul of the one being baptized when the rite of baptism was validly performed.

In summary, then, when Tertullian wrote about receiving the sacrament of baptism, he was talking about receiving the water that was poured on the head, but when Augustine wrote about receiving the sacrament of baptism, he was talking receiving an indelible sign on the soul.

St. Augustine was the most widely quoted patristic author during the Middle Ages. The main reason was that the medieval scholastics could read Latin but not Greek, so even though many fathers of the church wrote in Greek, the scholastic theologians could not use them as sources of information about the sacraments. Augustine not only wrote in Latin but he wrote lots of works about lots of different topics, so he was a great source of theological ideas in the Middle Ages.

St. Thomas Aquinas and other scholastics accepted Augustine’s idea of an indelible sign that was impressed upon the soul at baptism, which made it unnecessary and even impossible to be baptized more than once. Augustine had argued that trying to rebaptize someone would be like trying to put an identical brand on a sheep that had already been branded. The scholastics noted that there were other sacramental rituals that were never repeated, namely, confirmation and holy orders, so they reasoned that these too must bestow an indelible sign. They called the one received in confirmation the seal of the Holy Spirit, and they called the one received in ordination the priestly character. Since these invisible signs were signs of something sacred, the scholastics called them sacramenta or sacraments. And from that day to this, Catholics have talked about receiving the sacraments.

Why did the scholastic theologians believe it was so important that there be an invisible sacrament as well as the visible sacramental ritual? It was because the ritual is something physical—words, gestures, water, oil, and so forth—but the grace that the sacraments bestowed was something entirely spiritual. In their way of understanding how things worked, a physical cause could not have a spiritual effect, and so some intermediary was needed, something that was both material and spiritual. The idea of the invisible sign fit the bill, and so they used that idea to understand how the sacraments worked. The sacrament that is received is like something material because it is a sign, and it is like something spiritual because it is not composed of matter.

Next, we have to ask, what were the sacramental rituals in the Middle Ages, and what were their effects? The sacrament of baptism consisted of pouring water on an infant’s head, and the child was made a Christian for the rest of its life. The sacrament of confirmation consisted of a bishop anointing candidates with oil, as a result of which they could join a religious order and, if the candidate was a man, he could become a priest. The sacrament of holy orders consisted of a bishop laying hands on a man’s head and anointing his hands with oil, as a result of which the man was invested with priestly powers for the rest of his life. The sacrament of matrimony consisted of a man and woman professing marriage vows, as a result of which they were married for life. The Blessed Sacrament or Eucharist consisted of bread and wine that were consecrated by a priest, as a result of which, people could experience the real presence of Christ when they received communion during the mass or prayed before the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle. The sacrament of penance was needed to forgive serious sins, as a result of which the penitent was allowed to receive holy communion. The sacrament of extreme unction was needed to remove the remnants of sin  from the soul of a dying person, as a result of which he or she could die a happy death.

How did the scholastics know these things? They knew them from their own personal and social experience.

They knew from experience that once people were baptized, they were members of the Church for the rest of their lives. They knew from experience that when people were confirmed, they could be more dedicated Christians than the unconfirmed were. They knew from experience that when men were ordained, they remained priests for the rest of their lives. They knew from experience that when people were married, they stayed married until one of them died. They knew from experience that Christ was present in the Eucharist because they felt his real presence when they were saying mass. (We have to remember that the medieval theologians were all priests, and they were required to say mass every day.) They knew from experience that penance was needed for the forgiveness of sins because without it, people could not receive holy communion. They knew from experience that extreme unction was needed to die a happy death because those who received it were less anxious about dying.

The scholastics were teaching in schools of theology for about a century before they hammered out the scholastic theology that the Church takes for granted today. So we can say that the scholastics developed their sacramental theology to explain why the sacramental rituals had the effects they actually had in the Middle Ages. And they used the concept of the invisible sign, or the received sacrament, to explain the effects they perceived in medieval Christian society. as well as the effects they perceived in their own spiritual lives.

But what is the situation today? What is our experience today?

Children are baptized but there is no guarantee that they will remain members of the Church. They could become Protestants or Jews or Muslims or nones, as those who profess no religion are called today. Children and adolescents who are confirmed don’t seem to be any different than those who are not confirmed. In other words, confirmation does not seem to have any effect at all in the Church today.

People who marry in the Catholic Church today have a 50 percent chance of being divorced, and so we know from our own experience that marriage is not indissoluble. Men who are ordained do not necessarily remain priests, even though our medieval theology says they are priests forever. Penance, or the sacrament of reconciliation, is no longer needed to receive communion the way it used to be, and most Catholics no longer see it as a necessary ritual at all. The anointing of the sick—what used to be called extreme unction—is no longer used to guarantee a happy death. And one problem with it is that only priests are allowed to perform it. Why is that? It’s because the scholastics interpreted a passage in the Epistle of James as referring to priests, but we know now that the epistle was referring to elders in the community.

So now we come to the title of this presentation and the answer to the question, How did we get into this mess? How did we get into a situation where our sacraments no longer work the way they are supposed to? Why do the sacraments no longer have the effects that they had in the past?

The short answer is that the sacramental theory developed by the scholastics was thought to be universally true, that is, true for all places and times, but in fact is was not. The sacramental theory or theology fit Catholic experience for about seven centuries, from the mid-thirteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, so naturally the pope and bishops at the Second Vatican Council thought that it would be as true in the future as it was in the past. What they did not realize was that the combination of changed liturgical experience, which they themselves ordered in the hope of updating the Church, and the changes in culture and society, over which they had no control, would change the experience of Catholics just enough that the old theory no longer fit the new facts.

Let me given you an analogy from science.

Let’s say that a rather naïve earthling landed on Mars and expected his experience on Mars to be just like his experience on Earth. Immediately he would notice that he felt lighter. This is because Mars is a smaller planet than Earth, and so its gravity is weaker. If he managed to get outside without a space suit, he would find it impossible to breathe. This is because Mars has an atmosphere but it is a much thinner atmosphere than the one on Earth. I could give other examples, but you get the picture. Our imaginary space traveler believed that ideas that had served him well on Earth would serve him well in a different physical environment. In a similar way, the bishops at Vatican II (and in fact all of the liberal Catholics in the 1960s) thought that the ideas that had served well in the medieval environment of the pre-Vatican II church would continue to work well in the post-Vatican II church. But it didn’t happen.

Between the liturgical changes that the bishops authorized and the cultural changes of the 1960s and 70s, both the worship experience of Catholics and the cultural experience of Catholics changed to such an extent that the old ideas simply do not work any more. The old ideas no longer corresponded to reality as Catholics experienced it. To use a fancy word for this phenomenon, we can say that the old sacramental theology is dysfunctional; it just doesn’t work any more.

According to the theory, people who are baptized Catholics are supposed to stay Catholics forever, but they don’t. According to the theory, Catholics who are confirmed are supposed to be different from Catholics who are not confirmed, but they aren’t. According to the theory, Catholics need to go to confession to have their sins forgiven, but they don’t go to confession any more. According to the theory, Catholics who are married are supposed to stay married until they die, but about half of them don’t. According to the theory, priests are supposed to have spiritual gifts that make them different from laypeople, but the sexual abuse scandals make that hard to believe. According to the theory, only priests can anoint the sick, but because of the declining number of priests, many sick people are not anointed.

One way we can see how dysfunctional our sacramental theology has become would be to put ourselves in the place of the scholastic theologians and ask: What kind of sacramental theology would we develop today if we did it the same way the medieval theologians did, that is, by reflecting on our own personal and social experience?

  • Would we say that people could be baptized and confirmed only once? Other churches practice rebaptism and allow for repeated confirmation.
  • Would we say that only priests can hear confessions and anoint the sick? Unordained hospital chaplains often listen to the confessions of patients who are dying and some of them develop creative rituals, often through the laying on of hands, for giving spiritual comfort to the sick.
  • Would we say that only priests can preside at the liturgy when we know from history that in the early church community elders could preside at the Lord’s supper? Would we say that priest have to be men when we know from experience that there are churches with priests who are women?
  • Would we say that Catholics cannot divorce and remarry without the Church’s permission when most Catholics divorce and remarry without the Church’s permission? Of course not.

If this were just a theoretical matter, we could let the matter rest. But it is not just a theoretical matter. Scholastic sacramental theology governs Catholic canon law and the Church’s laws today are causing real harm to people. Our unrealistic theology of baptism leads Catholic parents to believe that they are giving their children something real when they bring them for baptism but the ritual does not give the children anything they do not already have. Our unrealistic theology of confirmation leads Catholic parishes to prepare children for a religious ritual that makes no difference in their lives. Our unrealistic theology of penance and anointing of the sick prevents the development of church rituals through which people could experience genuine reconciliation and spiritual healing without the intervention of a priest. Our unrealistic theology of marriage, instead of preventing divorce, forces many divorced Catholics to remarry outside the Church. And our unrealistic theology of ordination does not allow the ordination of women and married people, thus depriving us of the pastors and ministers we need to experience Christian living in realistically sized communities of faith.

So the issue is real, and it is important. It is impacting our own lives either directly or indirectly.

Now we know how we got into this mess, so the only question that remains is: What do we do to get us out of it?

Thank you for your attention.

=================================================
Do you like what you’ve read? If so, please say a few words to Dr. Martos below.  Maybe copy and post your favorite line.
Do you not like what you’ve read? If so, please say a few words about your discomfort.  Maybe copy and post your most objectionable line.