No one can know how to use or make good use of that with which he is not familiar. This simple fact also applies to religion. Therefore, the faithful often squander enormous benefits simply because they do not recognize their possibility or have only a vague notion of them. This lack of recognition can also occur regarding the Sacraments…

Newsroom (27/12/2021 19:35, Gaudium Press) Having lived 33 years on this earth, the moment had come for our Lord Jesus Christ to ascend to the Father. Prior to His departure, He established the Holy Catholic Church and entrusted to Her the great mission of leading men and women to God. To this end, He gave Her the most effective means for the sanctification of the faithful, chief among which are the Sacraments.

These gifts are constantly available to us, though we do not always seek them.

And to make the best use of them, it is undoubtedly necessary to know them better; after all, no one can use what he does not know….

So let us learn a little more about them.

The basics of the Sacraments

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “The Sacraments are efficacious signs of grace instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us. The visible rites by which the Sacraments are celebrated signify and realize the graces proper to each Sacrament. They bear fruit in those who receive them with the required dispositions.”[1]

1] Thus it is by virtue of the power of Our Lord Jesus Christ that these Sacraments produce grace, not by virtue of our merits.

They are, therefore, most efficacious means for the faithful to obtain graces, for through them man has the possibility of becoming a child of God; of being made a soldier of Christ; of being anointed as a minister of our Lord; of reflecting the union between Christ and the Church; of obtaining the forgiveness of sins and the full restoration of the soul, and – O unheard-of wonder – of receiving God into the soul!

There are seven Sacraments. They are: Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Holy Orders, and Matrimony. All of them were instituted by Our Lord Jesus Christ and entrusted to the Church, which has no power to institute them, but only to safeguard them.[2]

And for every faithful Catholic, the Sacraments are indispensable to salvation, as the Council of Trent states: “If anyone says that the Sacraments of the New Law are not necessary to salvation, but are superfluous, and that without them, or without the desire to receive them, men obtain from God, by faith alone, the grace of justification, though not all are necessary to all: let him be anathema.”[3]

Thus, the desire at least to receive the Sacraments, especially Baptism, as we shall see in another article, is indispensable to the attainment of eternal joy. For it is fitting that, God having established a way, men should follow it in order to attain Eternal Life.

The other two Sacraments necessary for a complete Christian initiation are Confirmation and the Eucharist. The others constitute a most effective means of sanctification and perfection in the state proper to each man.

As for the specific characteristics and graces proper to each Sacrament, it would be more appropriate to present each separately, lest we run the risk of exhausting such a rich and beautiful subject in a few short lines. This we propose to do in following articles.

By Thiago Resende

[1] CEC 1131.

[2] PAUL III. Council of Trent. 7th session. Cf. DH 1601; 1604.

[3] PAUL III. Council of Trent, 7th session. Seventh session. In: DH 1604.

Compiled by Sandra Chisholm