No Trifling Matter: Taking the Sacraments Seriously Again by Nicola Bux

Abstract

Reviewed by: No Trifling Matter: Taking the Sacraments Seriously Again by Nicola Bux Thomas M. Kocik Nicola Bux No Trifling Matter: Taking the Sacraments Seriously Again Translated by a Religious Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2018 210 pages. Clothbound, $28.00. Paperback, $17.95. Pope Francis, in his first encyclical Lumen Fidei, wrote: “The awakening of faith is linked to the dawning of a new sacramental sense in our lives as human beings and as Christians, in which visible and material realities are seen to point beyond themselves to the mystery of the eternal” (no. 40). To help hasten that dawn, Nicola Bux (b. 1947), a priest of the Archdiocese of Bari, Italy, and professor of sacramental theology and liturgy at the Theological Faculty of Puglia, has written an introduction to the theology of [End Page 91] the sacraments in the context of “the crisis of meaning that runs through the whole world” (14), or at least the heavily secularized modern West. Originally published in Italian in 2016, No Trifling Matter combines the exposition of basic catechetical material with “pithy insights, noble exhortations, and keen criticisms,” writes theologian Christopher J. Malloy in the book’s Foreword; as such, it “is not intended as a textbook” (1). The targets of those keen criticisms are identified in the Preface by the noted Italian journalist Vittorio Messori as “the deformations, the equivocations, the additions, and the omissions that today threaten the sacrament under consideration” (8). Many of these “-ions” betray an errant theology that collapses the sacred into the profane, thus obscuring the liturgy’s transcendent aim. For Bux, “the altar turned toward the people” epitomizes “a horizontal and sociological vision of Christianity,” indeed a “revolution in sacred space” (14). Further evidence of desacralization is found in the treatment of the sacraments “either as didascalia or as symbolic rites useful only for evoking what they signify, but not containing it: they have neither efficacy nor salvific power” (23). Chapter 1 presents the Christological foundation of the Church’s sacramental doctrine. Expanding on the famous aphorism of Pope St. Leo the Great, “What was visible in our Redeemer has passed over into the mysteries,” Bux writes: “With the sacraments, we touch Christ, we listen to Christ, we are nourished on Christ, we taste Christ, that is, the one whom we have seen and touched, as the evangelist John tells us” (23). While all the sacraments of the New Law communicate the grace won by the Savior’s Passion, the Eucharist alone contains “the reality of the person of Jesus in body, blood, soul and divinity” (21). The encounter with Christ in the Church’s sacramental life always has Trinitarian and soteriological implications: through the sacraments Christ “binds man to himself . . . in order to give him the life of the Spirit and carry him back to the Father from whom he has distanced himself on account of sin” (25). Touching on the question of liturgical language, Bux makes the usual arguments in favor of preserving Latin. First, the council [End Page 92] fathers at Vatican II expressly prescribed it, even as they indicated places for the introduction of vernacular languages (readings, admonitions, some prayers and songs). Second, in this age of increasing mobility, Latin unites peoples and cultures just as it had for many centuries been the common language of the Church in the West. Finally, Latin is less susceptible to linguistic mutation than the ever-evolving vernacular and therefore provides, as Dom Prosper Guéranger put it, “the arsenal of orthodoxy against all the subtleties of the sectarian spirit” (citation mine); it is for this reason a “sacred” language, “the inheritance of a tradition” of universal and immutable faith, corresponding to “the mission of the Church of Rome” (40). Chapters 2–8 expound the theology and historical development of the individual sacraments and their liturgical context, in the order presented in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: the three sacraments of Christian initiation, the two sacraments of healing, and the two sacraments of vocation. As a master of Catholic tradition, Bux always gives the primacy to grace. Hence, for example, he is critical of priests who, in order to stress the communal nature of baptism...