NEW UNDERSTANDING OF THE SACRAMENTS

...The shift presupposes an understanding of the presence and action of Christ in the church that is convinced that "present" means now and that "action" means creativity rather than the running of clockwork...

...Theologically, as I see it, we are still only half way around Tillich's circle...

...A survey of publishers' catalogs, academic journals and current book reviews seems to yield very little indeed in terms of conventional expectations—the occasional study on Penance or Holy Orders, an ecumenical symposium on Eucharistic theology, and not much else...

...We have had a long period of experimentation in making the signs signify with verve and with full participation of all...

...Questions on the Eucharistic presence of Jesus must deal with a far greater range of possibilities when asked in an ecumenical context...

...It is not really that we no longer want that kind of magic, but just that many forces y lay...

...Similarly in Jesus and the Eucharist by Tad Guzie (Paulist, 1975), the meaning of "real presence" is elaborated in terms of the total secular context of our lives and relationships...

...It makes an immense difference to ask what is a "valid" celebration of Eucharist in terms of conditions supposed to have been clearly established at some time in the past (at or close to the origins of the tradition in apostolic times), and to ask what is a truly sacramental celebration in terms of the intended outcome of the Eucharist...

...What, then are the questions left unanswered and the tasks in store for the future...

...We have much to hope from encounters with the Hassidic traditions in Judaism, but also from encounters with the traditions and lore of Hinduism...

...It seems to be clearer to some Protestant partners in the dialogue, such as Langdon Gilkey in Catholicism Confronts Modernity (Seabury, 1975) than it has yet begun to be to many of the Catholic participants...

...From time to time, volumes of Concilium have been devoted to death and dying as a universal dimension of human life, to marriage as a common mode of human life and experience, to the tragedy of the broken marriage relationship and the task of Christian support to the partners in a broken marriage...

...We became aware of the sacramental activity of the church in its historical developments, shaped by human ingenuity and perversity, taking unfortunate as well as happy turns...

...Questions about the sacraments of initiation, the proper sequence, the appropriate ages, and so on, are all but insoluble, asked in the light of the ancient practice and the subsequent legislation and interpretation, but become quite tractable when asked in relation to the goals intended...

...know that tions, conies m the young sed by temcontext, to :rsonal faith Itch's model leself in the and learning : spirit that i had...

...We are very good at that...

...The next step is to turn the focus of attention away from the ritual and towards the meaning and goals of Christian life and worship...

...Grace is very much "in," but the theology of grace is no longer to be found in connection with a discussion of the ceremonial of the sacraments...

...The issues being addressed are not primarily concerned with the moment of the ceremony nor with the clerical presence, action, or sanction involved...

...Contributing to this is the slow but sure emergence of the wider ecumenism which is bringing us into encounter not only with the de-sacramentalizing trends of Christianity found in Protestant communities, but also with Judaism and the great religions of the world with their great wealth of ritual and traditional symbolism...

...Not everyone can follow Tillich's model of "breaking the symbols" only to find oneself in the end taking back "the broken symbols" and learning to live by them in a certain poverty of spirit that does not ask for more certainty than can be had...

...But we have not yet passed this adolescent triumph in order to come home to our Catholic heritage as adults...

...It is ecumenical not only in the sources on which it draws but also in its assumptions* about church and salvation, and this is in part because it is eschatologically oriented...

...However, it is another matter altogether to begin to scrutinize our understanding of the church, its institutions, the role of clergy and hierarchy, the sacraments and their meaning, by the light of this newly awakened awareness...

...Our own secularity somehow got far ahead of where we wanted to be...

...We are not very good at that...

...This kind of internal strain, which shows up most clearly in the new-style sacramental theology, is something that is new to the Catholic community in general, though gifted individuals at all times have experienced it...

...One can not write only for the vanguard, nor restrict a discussion only to the professionally qualified...

...It was one thing to give intellectual assent to the thesis of Henri de Lubac and (independently) of Karl Rahner, that grace is not wholly inaccessible to experience, that the supernatural is a transformation of the reality we apprehend as the natural and not a separate reality floating, as it were, above the natural...

...What can be quietly contained and left implicit in the parish celebrations over a considerable period of time must, of course, become quite painfully explicit when it becomes the subject of a course in Christian doctrine or Christian theology...

...However, there are signs of a positive reassessment...

...The painstaking work of historians of the liturgy, such as Josef Jungmann, eagerly disseminated by the liturgical movement, created the climate in which the Dogmatic Constitution, Sacrosanctum concilium, could open the floodgates of liturgical reform...

...John's Abbey, Collegevflle...

...We have seen it in other cases as a mysterious and esoteric language for special people...

...For several decades much thought and effort and experimentation went into the task of making the signs signify, and this effort continues...

...Time was when we could answer with a smile, "ex opere operato" not necessarily intending thereby to commit ourselves to too much of a conversion to Christ and the Way...

...This could be extended also to questions about Penance and reconciliation, about marriage and its ecclesial solemnization as the sacrament of Matrimony, about the Anointing of the Sick and the Ordination of ministers...

...The third dimension of the new mode of sacramental theology is closely related to this...

...Questions about infant baptism, about conditions for a valid baptism, and so on, quickly become questions about the difference that baptism should make...

...The ecumenical context has been causing us to look again at the Reformation questions Commonweal: 377 about the relation between ritual and authentic conversion to Christ, and about the relation between official church ministrations and salvation...

...Theology already mirrors this, in the type of question that is being proposed and resolved, even in those periodicals and books that are professedly about "liturgy," such as the publications of the Liturgical Conference and of St...

...With philosophical acumen we have "broken" the symPrologue...

...It is essentially a task in which theologians must engage the living, worshipping Catholic community...

...The type of approach suggested by the work of Mircea Elaide and initiated in past decades by such books as Louis Bouyer's Rite and Man (University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), is yet to fructify...

...Theology grows and sacramental theology grows primarily in life and worship and only secondarily in critical reflection and deliberate attempts at synthesis...

...One of these, in my opinion, is the fact that in response to the continuing Protestant challenge to our viewing the sacramental life of the church in a seven of pleniire extensive i high school sntained and er a considecome quite ubject of a »n theology...

...Many [ that circle, not set out, hem...

...Similarly, it is concerned with the spiritual-ascetical dimensions of ministry as basic and the ritual as derived from and subordinated to it...

...It is, of course, in the first place in the ecumenical context, that those questions are asked concerning ministry and ordination, which eventually call for basic reevaluation of our understanding of the sacraments as mediating grace...

...At this point, any responsible Catholic theologian must return to some consideration of what is specific in Catholicism...

...Questions about the Eucharistic presence of Jesus, move rather quickly away from the change in bread and wine to the change in the participant community—which is, of course, where those questions began historically...

...Though concerned with ministry it is neither addressed exclusively to priests, nor concerned exclusively with the ministry of priests...

...This outcome has been predictable since the first time a liturgical reformer gave forth the battle-cry: the signs should signify...

...Strangely, this kind of tension and conflict seems to surface very little in Sunday morning parish celebration...

...The training of Catholic theologians and of North Americans in particular, renders them curiously inept for the purpose...

...Grace becomes visible as transforming power in our experiences, actions and relationships in these dimensions...

...It is not so much that we no longer want magic that sanctifies us without our having to change, and makes us God's special pets without our really having to be any better than anybody else...

...Vatican Council II did nothing to change the traditional ideals and standards that have been part of the church's message from the start in this fundamental area of Christian behavior...

...Moreover, those who teach these courses know that resistance to the pursuit of radical questions, comes not only from the older generation but from the young people themselves...

...Ecumenism Sacramental theology, however, has not only gone underground, become lay in focus and concerned with the spiritual-ascetical questions...

...A final aspect of the new mode of sacramental theology as it is already being practiced, is that it is eschatological in its orientation and therefore tends to be radical in its questions...

...One of in response our viewing en of plenitude and universality, there has been no serious move among Catholic theologians to narrow the notion of sacramentality to Baptism and Eucharist alone...

...It is here that grace can be observed...

...Though a large tome (at $25) it is not esoteric...

...These are the lay dimensions of the sacraments of Viaticum and of Matrimony, and to most of us these are the "real" dimensions, the reality that is signified by the signs...

...This is still in a twilight phase of sudden recognition and insights that do not yet connect...

...We have—God help us!—often considered our rich heritage of symbolism as good enough for illiterate peasants and primitives...

...We have much study to do in our own tradition—in our saint lore, our iconography, out hymnody, the symbolism of our mystics and our spirituality traditions...

...There is a question here for some Catholics, as to whether this kind of approach denies the divine institution and initiative in the sacraments and their direct link to the person of Jesus the Christ...

...Less and less is it possible to participate in the sacraments as conditions of church membership while considering the spiritual and ascetical aspects of Christian teaching an optional extra catered by the sodality, holy name society, third order or such...

...It is not that sanctifies takes us God's be any better we no longer t many forces today conspire to bring us to the rude realization that we can not have the magic...

...Somehow, the innocent fun has gone out of all this...

...We are no longer asking what the sacraments do to or for us (or our children), but what exactly we could and should be doing in, with and through them...

...This has happened in most areas of theology, partly as a result of the "theology of hope" propagated by German Protestant theologians, Juergen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg, and of the various socio-critical theologies that have followed from these in Catholic circles...

...Not everyone is equipped by temperament, intelligence and personal social context, to ask radical analytical questions about personal faith and beliefs...

...We have tried in some cases to take the symbolism as literally intended prose description...

...It presupposes the influence of Christ on the community that is his church, coming from the end-time, from the projected goal, as well as from the past...

...The ideas always escape into public view...

...In terms of our experience of Catholicism within the lifetime of the present generations, the whole shift is not unproblematic but beset with difficulties and insecurities which must be worked through slowly and with participation of the Catholic community, if we are to make any meaningful synthesis for our times...

...We have been learning the hard way that the style and emotional tonality which ring true and invke' participation in some groups, are felt as inauthentic and alien and resented as psychological imperialism by others...

...If I were asked to recommend one book as a sample of the current trends in sacramental theology I would have no hesitation at all in recommending this one...

...Therefore the shift of sacramental theology into the ecumenical arena is an inescapable and probably irreversible move to a style of reflection fraught with conflicts within the Catholic community...

...e theologian tt is specific is Catholi1, social, or > is one of 1 it appears : the sacrarged on the It seems to fie dialogue, Confronts st begun to . However, at...

...We have been learning, I think, that we need classic styles that are not too explicit in the emotion expressed, not clumsily obvious in the symbolism used, not so comprehensively formulated that all the thinking, imagining and praying is done for us...

...It is here iy in its preind of coming lergy...

...Whether one asks such questions does not seem to depend on spiritual seriousness or maturity, nor yet on intellectual seriousness or maturity...

...Questions about the nature of marriage as sacramental, its dissolubility or indissolubility, the extent and justification of ecclesiastical intervention in and regulation of Christian marriages, and so forth, likewise are handled in completely different ways according to a search for precedent and law in the past or according to the relationship that marriages may have to salvation...

...bols we took too literally...

...forties, fifties and sixties...

...It is difficult to reflect on the meaning of the sacraments without facing some very uncomfortable questions about the way we live our lives...

...Consequently those engaged in ecumenical dialogue may see some rather radical questions as urgent and central to the Catholic theological endeavor, but at the same time may become painfully aware that they do not speak for the Catholic community at large any more than they speak for the church hierarchy or the clergy at large...

...Vatican II opened the gates cautiously to a reconsideration of Reformation issues...

...Certainly, whatever else it is Catholicism is not for an intellectual, educational, social, or economic elite, but intended for all...

...They, however, having been held back so long, burst upon us very much faster than we are quite able to cope with them...

...This encounter is and has been a strong counterforce to the demands for secularization, demythologizing, modernization and reduction to a common denominator...

...The move into the ecumenical context has happened, of course, throughout our Catholic theology, but in sacramental theology it has radical consequences...

...It is "underground" sacramental theology in the sense that it focuses not on the sacrament of Holy Orders, but on the tasks of ministry and the goals Commonweal: 379 to which they tend...

...This is not simply a task for theologians, to be applied later by preachers, catechists and spiritual writers...

...Slowly and painstakingly we are having to reconcile what we know and learn from experience and reflection with authoritative claims from the past voiced by living representatives whose claims to authentic, interpretation are both extensive and invested with an aura of the sacred which intensifies them...

...No serious Catholic theologian wants to undermine the bases of credibility for Catholic faith nor to weaken the solidarity of the Catholic community...

...Much of the historical spadework was done in th...

...In sacramental theology the effect of translating questions into an eschatological perspective is very liberating...

...It also created the climate in which systematic theologians like Karl Rahner and Edouard Schillebeeckx could raise delicate issues concerning the communication of grace through the sacraments, concerning the meaning of the Eucharist, the questions involved in cqncelebration, and so on...

...What we have yet to do in a thorough way, is to return to our heritage of symbolism and study it seriously as the normal expression of the community's faith...

...What we are waiting for now is a bursting forth of theologically sophisticated poets, of post-critical contemplatives, to generate within Catholicism what A.J...

...Most of all, we seem now to be releaming the hard way that the sacraments are, and must be, worship—people turning godwards...

...In a /en has written ng, conversion, », the suffering tensions of the From time to ;n devoted to iion of human luman life and n marriage reupport to the the lay dimenof Matrimony, timensions, the Jrace becomes xperiences, aeons...

...What I mean by eschatological, is that the questions asked are in reference to the outcome expected, and therefore ultimately in reference to the content of Christian hope...

...Sacramental theology has become essentially spiritual-ascetical theology, and this is surely neither surprising nor disappointing to those who have worked for liturgical, biblical and patristic revival in our times...

...It is not that grace has gone out of fashion...

...The questions that arise quickly become more radical than one cares to ask...

...It seems rather to depend on whether one has been overtaken by radicalizing experiences...

...It seemed at that time that the liturgical reforms of Vatican II and its post-conciliar commission, coupled with the re-examination of the term transubstantiation, had penetrated to the inner sanctum of Catholicism and that nothing significant could really happen after that...

...The fences around it had been broken down, and the boundless kinds of questions that now had to be asked were so terrifying that they were being asked in very guarded terms, and most of us were trying not to hear them...

...For large segments of the Catholic community the time has come in which church, Sunday and sacraments are not able to justify themselves autonomously, without reference to total life style...

...It is largely a problem of community loyalty and solidarity...

...Once we admit that assertions concerning grace and the supernatural are not beyond critical scrutiny based on human experience, then we are asking what difference the sacraments make on the basis of observation, what role they play in the life of the individual and the community on the basis of observation...

...They must also deal far more respectfully with new or "unorthodox" positions...

...In a series of books and articles, Henri Nouwen has written about the everyday dimensions of healing, conversion, reconciliation and support to the broken, the suffering and the troubled...

...Unthinkable questions become thinkable...

...We are still not quite sure what to do with it, but it is obviously the road to a new synthesis...

...Church as cultural heritage simply does not have the same hold...

...It impinges on most ordinary Catholic families for the first time in the instruction offered their children, whether in a sacramental catechesis given to younger children in the parish or in more extensive discussion undertaken with young people in high school or college classes...

...It has also become irrevocably and inclusively ecumenical...

...We have all been taught not to contemplate, not to imagine, not to take pride and pleasure in the concrete and the particular, not to remember and not to dream...

...But the Council did achieve a total turn about in the church's appreciation of the physiological, psychosocial and conjugal aspects of marriage that has refatheb F. x. MURPHY, c.s.s.R., is the Rector of Holy Redeemer College in Washington, D.C...

...Apparently innocent issues like the possibility of intercommunion among Christians of different denominational affiliations glide imperceptibly towards a reevaluation of all church structure and its normative claims...

...In other words, this eschatological focus is really part of the same shift that has tended to make sacramental theology "go underground," become lay, fuse with spiritual-ascetical theology, move into the ecumenical context and tend to be radical...

...The isconcerned with th the clerical "hus in the rejczy, Becoming Baptism is enmeans to be of our history Jesus and the ), the meaning us of the total ionships...

...What happened, however, was that sacramental theology in the narrower sense disappeared...

...Yet suddenly the task has become a very difficult and delicate one because the authentic and necessary questions that present themselves at this stage, seem to threaten the grounds of credibility on which the faith of so many Catholics still rests...

...More latterly, we have simply been terribly ashamed of it and tried to hide it and look as Protestant, modernized, secularized and demythologized as possible...

...Sacramental theology has become lay in its preoccupations because there has been a kind of coming of age not only of the laity but of the clergy...

...This does not seem to happen to all of us...

...This is an agenda that can not be avoided indefinitely...

...Thus in the recently translated book of Alexander Ganoczy, Becoming Christian (Paulist, 1977), the study of Baptism is entirely devoted to reflection on what it means to be Christian in the ordinary, secular context of our history and our political options...

...Rather there has tended to be a willingness to extend sacramentality more explicitly to all dimensions of life and to resuscitate in new ways the old idea of "the sacramentals...

...What is particularly distressing is that the Protestant experience of dealing with community conflicts over belief formulations does not really help us...

...But in all of this, the more we succeed in making the signs signify, the more we are thrown back to the hard question whether that which they signify is really happening...

...These questions do not readily stay in the realm of the academic but present themselves as questions about our own life style...

...It is, I maintain, in spite of its subject matter, a seriously lay approach because of its concerns, because of its horizons, because of its persistent ordering of the personal dimensions as basic and the institutional or organizational dimensions as derived from and subordinated to the personal...

...Many people only seem to get half way around that circle, losing everything, and many others will not set out, fearing that that is what will happen to them...

...This is not an intellectual problem, as evidenced by the issue of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies already mentioned...

...If people are not personally committed, they tend not to be ritually involved...

...These are the lay dimensions of the sacraments of Penance and of the sick...

...Heschel called "depth theology...

...That is something which has emerged on the positive side in the ecumenical context...

...Rather it is found in discussion of the living reality to which the ceremonial points...

...In eschatological focus these dimensions are rather obviously necessary and unproblematic...

...This is one of the particular strengths of Catholicism and it appears especially in the practice and theology of the sacraments...

...However, while sacramental theology is not being addressed in the ways we had come to expect within Catholicism, a great deal is going on that has direct bearing on our understanding of the sacraments...

...It is concerned with ministry in ways that coax one to rearrange one's whole horizon...

...This is more particularly true of Eucharistic theology, as witnessed, for instance, by the Spring 1976 issue of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies...

...The conditions and expectations are so different...

...There is no doubt that a sacramental practice and theology that are viable in the present and for the future, must rest on a better appropriation of image, symbol and story than we have made at present...

...It created the climate in which the Dutch theologians, following up on lengthy ecumenical endeavors, could suggest a reformulation of the doctrine of transubstantiaation in terms of transignification and transfinalization —a climate that also brought an anxious reply from the Holy See in the encyclical Mysterium fidei...

...It also presupposes church as a community of thinking, imagining, and creatively initiating persons, not a parade of generations through patterns of behavior established long ago and far outside the consciousness of the present participants...

...If we did not like the sound of "substitutionary death" there are nevertheless some indications that we flirted dangerously with the hidden assumption of substitutionary conversion...

...The attempt to do justice to the Catholic Church's stand on marriage and sexuality at this moment in history is obviously a perilous undertaking...

...Questions about the age for Confirmation naturally become questions about the expected outcome of Confirmation, and we are right back in the reflection on what it means in the concrete to live out a Christian commitment...

...The one book that is probably the single most helpful contribution to the whole process, among those published in America recently, is the monumental study by Bernard Cooke, Ministry to Word and Sacraments (Fortress, 1976...

...Just as instant symbols seldom succeed in becoming part of community consciousness and tradition, so an instant or superimposed new synthesis of the symbols, images, stories and rituals, is very unlikely to be other than alien to the community for which it is intended...

...The second dimension of the new mode of sacramental theology, therefore, is that besides having gone underground, it has become distinctively lay...

...I do not believe that we are in a crypto-pelagian phase of theology, attempting to lift ourselves by our own psychological and sociological bootstraps without benefit of divine intervention...