The Physical, Salvation, and the Need for the Sacraments

The sacraments are the only way—short of a miracle—that God’s grace are assured to us in the full and complete reality of whom we are as human beings.

Father Joseph T. O'Callahan serves an injured crewman aboard the USS Franklin (CV-13), after the ship was set afire by a Japanese air attack on March 19, 1945 — the Feast of St. Joseph, the foster father of Jesus. (Photo: U.S. Navy (Naval Historical Center), via Wikimedia Commons)
Father Joseph T. O'Callahan serves an injured crewman aboard the USS Franklin (CV-13), after the ship was set afire by a Japanese air attack on March 19, 1945 — the Feast of St. Joseph, the foster father of Jesus. (Photo: U.S. Navy (Naval Historical Center), via Wikimedia Commons) (photo: Register Files)

Dominican Father Dominic Langevin penned a thoughtful piece over at First Things, explaining It’s quite timely, America’s bishops having decided to lock down the country’s churches and “feed their sheep” with online Masses. Several bishops have gone a step further, barring (unjustly, in my opinion) access to various sacraments. But if you can “watch” Mass, why can’t you remotely “confess” your sins?

Now, the bishops who have dispensed the Sunday Mass obligation certainly have not said that TV or internet Mass “replaces” real Sunday Mass. They haven’t said that the obligation is waived but you must watch a remote Mass: they have encouraged it, along with spiritual Communion (an all-but-forgotten discipline, given the phenomenon of infrequent confession/frequent Communion that has marked much of the Western, post-Vatican II Church). TV Mass keeps us somehow connected with the real thing. But accept no substitutes (because they’re not substitutable).

The bishops are of a certain generation. Their average age is 65 (at least according to some 2016 data that sounds right). This is not the generation that grew up with iPhones in their hands and computer screens in their faces.

That latter generation has grown up with those things and sees the world in different ways. They have replaced reality pure and simple with “virtual” reality. “Friends” are the 287,471 followers on a screen, almost all of whom they’ve never met. “Contact” with someone else is generally disembodied, sometimes synchronous but usually asynchronous. (For those above a certain age, it means: contact in real time, like talking on a video conference, versus contact “whenever,” like answering an email at my leisure).

I have no temptation to try to teach metaphysics today. We’d have to spend a lot of time just talking about “real.”

I make these points because I would not preclude the question: “Why can’t we have confession by Zoom or some other app?” Father Langevin douses his reader with a “no” when asked if there could be something like 1-800-CONFESS?

Now, I agree with Father Langevin’s arguments. In the end, they boil down to the need for “real physical and moral presence” between confessor and penitent, appropriate to a “full, natural, human conversation.” The question is: are we living in a culture for which a “full, natural, human conversation” is asynchronous, impersonal, virtual and remote?

What concerned me, in some ways even more than Father Langevin’s article, was the discussion in the comments, in which I took an active part. The gist of several commentators’ argument was simply: Aren’t Father Langevin and I unduly restricting the scope of God’s grace and “mercy?” How do we know that God doesn’t forgive sins that way? Yes, it is an “extraordinary means” (amazing how those who would create theological novelties will exploit traditional theological terminology) but these are “extraordinary times.” The sacraments are the “ordinary”—but not the only—means of conferring grace.

And this is what concerns me because—as I said in a previous post — there is a strong odor of dualist Gnosticism to this.

Yes, God is not restricted by his sacramental order in the sense that He cannot give grace apart from it. But in one sense God is restricted: His hesed, his faithfulness, has declared that He stands behind these sacraments. The sacraments will infallibly give grace as long as the recipient does not block that grace. If you go to confession sorry for all your mortal sins out of some supernatural motive, intending to avoid them again, and want to do the penance the priest imposes, your sins are forgiven. Full stop and no doubt.

The sacraments come with God’s guarantee of their efficacy. “Extraordinary” means of sanctification do not.

Catholic theology once upon a time expressed this guarantee in the technical theological term ex opere operato, “by the work performed.” In other words, when the Church’s minister intends to do what the Church does, irrespective of his personal worthiness or belief, the sacraments accomplish their purpose. This is not magic. It is not an incantation or magic formula. It is God’s assurance that he stands by his Word and that Word is good.

There is no such accompanying “guarantee” for “extraordinary” means of sanctification.

Now, why did God give us sacraments? We hear this question in various forms, generally when a sacrament makes us uncomfortable, e.g., “why do I have to confess my sins to a priest? Why can’t I just confess right to God?” The answer entails a trip through theological anthropology, a fancy word for saying what Catholics understand human beings to be.

And what are they: they are bodily-spiritual beings who exist in space and time.

God is not a bodily being, who exists in eternity and whose presence fills the universe (Ephesians 4:10). So, how do these two very different beings—God and man—connect?

Through a sacramental order.

  • Jesus, who “for us and for our salvation” became man, i.e., took on flesh (John 1:14; Hebrews 2:14) is the sacrament of God: He, who is God, makes the Father visible and present (John 14:9) to us, in space and time, as his brothers and sisters;
  • But, by becoming man, Jesus also takes on man’s limitations, i.e., being bound by space and time. So how does Jesus of first-century Palestine connect with John of 21st-century America? By the sacraments. The seven sacraments make Jesus present here and now, in space and time, physically and spiritually. In the Eucharist one receives today in a concrete place Jesus is really present, “body and blood, soul and divinity.” The sacraments, by respecting man’s bodily-temporal-spatial limits, bridge God and man.

So the sacraments are not just an “optional extra,” a “nice way” that God established for our sanctification that we, who are so less “physicalistic” don’t need. The sacraments are the only way—short of a miracle—that God’s grace are assured to us in the full and complete reality of whom we are as human beings.

Because of this basic necessity of the sacraments, I have major problems with the way that many bishops have simply tried to make them inaccessible. To me, it betrays an insufficient appreciation of the centrality of the sacramental order and reeks of the paternalist and canonical-might-makes-right clericalism supposedly so not in vogue in today’s Church.

Having affirmed that the sacraments are the “ordinary” way to God that carry His assurance of their efficacy, I find it interesting that the commentators to Fr. Langevin’s article who speak about the “possibility” of God granting grace in such and such a way, the “cannot be excluded” chance of these other means, etc. are—by the very conditional, subjunctive language they employ—proving my point. Yes, God can save us as he wishes, but God is normally faithful to His Word and His means (behind which stands His Word). We have no such assurances for these “extraordinary” means.

Well, replies the critic: God is “merciful” and “surely” God’s “mercy” will guarantee them.        

Well, maybe, maybe not. Maybe the road to hell is paved with a lot of counterfeit “mercy.” In the end, then why join the Church? Why receive sacraments? Why remain in the Church? Why not assume these “extraordinary” ways of receiving God’s grace are not just limited to times of contagion? How do these “extraordinary” means cease becoming in fact “ordinary?”

This mentality is not limited to the sacraments. It flares up every now and then in the larger question of Jesus’ role as Mediator between God and man, “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Is all salvation somehow mediated through Jesus, must have some conscious or unconscious relationship to the Christ? Or is Jesus just “the Christian Way” that comes out for Tibetans as “the Buddhist Way,” for Indians as “the Hindu Way,” and for secular Westerners as the “good-ole’boy (no unwoke sexism intended) Way?”

“Perfect acts of contrition” forgive sins, including mortal sins (with the understanding that the repentance includes the intent to confess when the opportunity is available). But there is no assurance that what I think may be a “perfect act of contrition” is one. Sacramental confession obviates the need for that perfection (i.e., sorrow motivated by the pure love of Christ) by recognizing that sinners—despite their residual attachment to sin—may out a healthy self-sense of spiritual welfare repent. That’s why the sacrament of Penance operates ex opera operato – with the divine guarantee behind it – but my subjective “act of perfect contrition” may operate only ex opera operantis, it might achieve its goal, but I have no assurance it has.

Perhaps this is another symptom of our culture. We are on a constant “quest for” or “journey toward” truth, but deep down we have real doubts we can ever find or know it (and should certainly not be so socially gauche as to suggest we have). We are more interested in the journey than the destiny, which makes one wonder whether we really believe in or want that truth if we found it. Perhaps that’s why we can readily set aside the assurance of the sacraments in favor of hopes and “suppositions” in the efficacy of “extraordinary means” in “extraordinary times.” We don’t believe what’s promised to us, but we want to believe in what, in the end, we perhaps find more comfortable or convenient.

I believe in God’s saving will and his Providence: whatever reason the coronavirus scourge has struck us, he is in control of history. And, in the hope that we will pass through this contagion, I suggest we have a real problem the Church is going to have to face and not sweep under the rug: do we really believe the sacraments are essential to salvation? Because there are lots of forces in our culture – and, it seems, in our Church, too – whose anti-physicalism answers that question, in a practical sense, “no.”