The Efficacy of the Sacraments for Christian Living: A Thomistic View

Abstract

The Efficacy of the Sacraments for Christian Living: A Thomistic View Thomas P. Harmon Introduction The Eucharist, in the words of the Second Vatican Council, is the “source and summit” of the Church’s life.1 In Sacrosanctum concilium we read: “From the liturgy, therefore, particularly the eucharist, grace is poured forth upon us as from a fountain; the liturgy is the source for achieving in the most effective way possible human sanctification and God’s glorification, the end to which all the Church’s other activities are directed.”2 In light of this, one would expect the Church’s sacramental life to loom large in the minds of Catholic moral theologians . And yet, oddly enough, there are those who seem not to have adequately appreciated the importance of the sacraments for living the Christian moral life.3 This, I believe, is largely the result of a diminished sense of sacramental realism, by which I mean an understanding of the sacraments as efficacious signs of sanctification. One finds evidence of this in a volume by Charles Curran, who was censured by Rome for his deviations in moral theology. After acknowledging that “the divine is mediated through natural and created things” (a doctrine essential to sacramental realism), Curran writes that the Eucharist is “primarily a meal” much like other fellowship meals at which “human families and friends gather to celebrate their love and make themselves present to one another.”4 1 Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen gentium (21 November 1964) 11. 2 Second Vatican Council, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum concilium (4 December 1963), in Documents on the Liturgy 19631979 : Conciliar, Papal, and Curial Texts, ed. International Commission on English in the Liturgy (Collegeville MN: Liturgical Press, 1982) 1, §10, p. 7. 3 This problem is not exclusive to post-Vatican II Catholicism. Although “progressive” moral theologians often disparaged the pre-conciliar moral theology manuals, they follow the same manuals in their marginal treatment of the sacraments. 4 Charles E. Curran, The Catholic Moral Tradition Today: A Synthesis Antiphon 14.3 (2010): 247-260 248 Thomas P. Harmon With that, I am reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s famous reply to Mary McCarthy in defense of the Eucharist: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”5 What the otherwise taciturn O’Connor was saying was that the Eucharist does not merely point toward something vaguely transcendent; it makes present the reality it signifies: Christ’s life-giving body and blood. She realized what was at stake when sacraments are not understood as signs that effect what they signify here and now. Anything less than sacramental realism is of little use to homo viator on his journey to God within the community of the Church. Other examples can be adduced to show that sacramental realism has (at best) a marginal place in much of contemporary moral theology. Paulinus Odozor places baptism and the Eucharist alongside other “spiritual practices” mandated in the New Testament.6 James Keenan affirms that the sacrament of penance helps us to confront our sinfulness, but there is no sense of it bestowing any helpful graces .7 In two textbooks, one by Josef Fuchs8 and the other by Terence Kennedy,9 discussion of the sacraments is absent. By contrast, the work of St Thomas Aquinas offers an integrated sacramental and moral theology. For the Angelic Doctor, the sacraments are crucial for living the Christian life of faith, hope, and charity, as they are the ordinary means by which God bestows his grace to help us grow to the perfect image of the Savior. Happily, a recovery of Thomas’s moral theology has been underway, thanks in no small way to the work of the Dominican theologian Servais Pinckaers (d. 2008).10 From him and other moral theologians who have integrated (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999) 11. 5 Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979) 125. 6 Paulinus Ikechukwu Odozor, Moral Theology in an Age of Renewal: A Study of the Catholic Tradition Since Vatican II (Notre Dame IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2003) 161. 7 James F. Keenan, Moral...