What is a Sacrament?

We all know that being Catholic is awesome! Why? There are so many reasons, but the big one is that we have the Seven Sacraments. This year, we will explore each of those Sacraments in detail in our Domestic Church Corner. You’ll be able to read about a different Sacrament in the bulletin on the first Sunday of each month, and then on each of the following Sundays, we’ll feature activities related to that Sacrament to help reinforce the teaching.

What are the Sacraments exactly? The Catechism of the Catholic Church says they are “efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us” (CCC 1131). 

All of us are both physical and spiritual, we have bodies and souls, united into one person. God is pure spirit, and His son, Jesus, is also pure spirit but Jesus united His divine nature with our human nature when He became incarnate. Incarnate is a fancy word that means Jesus took on flesh, a body just like ours. We know God is our loving father, and like all loving fathers, He wants to give us gifts. God’s biggest gift to us is His grace. Grace is His divine life within us, which means, in our souls, grace gives us the means to divinization and holiness.  We don’t earn it or deserve it; we truly get it as pure gift.   

Jesus, in His physical body, had five senses just like we do, and He walked the face of the earth in places like Galilee and Jerusalem. When He was with people, He healed them, touched them, cast out demons, told them stories to teach them, loved them, forgave them, and challenged them to come out of their state of sin. Life was good for those who got to have both a physical and spiritual encounter with Jesus. But in our age, Jesus is in Heaven, so how we substantially encounter Him today is through the Sacraments.  God can give us His grace however He chooses, like in prayer or through little prompts. He doesn’t need to do it through the Sacraments.  However, since God gave us the Sacraments as the means to receive grace, it is necessary for us to make use of them.

The word sacrament has its origin in the Greek word ‘mysterion’ and in the Latin word ‘sacramentum’, meaning something hidden or secret. Jesus wanted to leave us a way to encounter Him and to get the grace we need to become holy. He did it by instituting the Sacraments.  He makes Himself present in each Sacrament so that we can have an encounter with Him.

The Seven Sacraments instituted by Christ, include Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Reconciliation, Anointing of the Sick, Holy Orders, and Matrimony. They are even grouped into Sacraments of Initiation (Baptism, Eucharist, and Confirmation), Sacraments of Healing (Reconciliation and Anointing of the Sick) and Sacraments of Service (Holy Matrimony and Holy Orders). What’s more is that they are meant to accompany us through our human life and its’ really big moments. In the Catechism it tells us that “the seven sacraments touch all the stages and all important moments of the Christian life” (CCC 1210).

Back to that earlier definition:
• “efficacious signs” – that means they really do what they say they do. When someone is baptized, water is poured, and words are spoken. Water cleanses physically, but the Sacrament of Baptism cleanses us spiritually of original sin and personal sin. The water is a sign of what’s really happening spiritually, which is the cleansing of sins.
• “signs of grace” – what’s going on in the physical world is a sign of the grace being poured out in each Sacrament. When sins are confessed and the priest grants absolution in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, the grace of forgiveness and the grace to “sin no more” is given to the penitent.

• “instituted by Christ” – Jesus gave us every single Sacrament. The Church didn’t invent the Sacraments as rituals or rules to be followed and observed. Jesus knew He wouldn’t be walking among us anymore and He wanted us to be close to Him even when He was in Heaven.
• “entrusted to the Church” – this means Jesus gave them to Peter and His Apostles (the bishops) to safeguard and administer them. Jesus didn’t specify minutely all the details of how each Sacrament would be conferred in terms of the matter and form used (more on matter and form in a minute), rather He left the Sacraments entrusted to the Church to discern the exact matter and form from the teachings of Christ and from Holy Scripture. The Church can’t change the substance of the Sacraments but can determine the matter and form when not precisely dictated by Jesus.
• “by which divine life is dispensed to us.” – The Sacraments give us grace, but that grace is totally caused by God and not by what the minister or the form and matter of the Sacrament say or do. God alone causes the grace. The sacraments give us divine life (grace) through the merits of Christ and of His suffering. Jesus instituted the Sacraments, but He could give us the grace, should he choose to do so, without the external ceremony.

When we started this article, we recalled how we are physical and spiritual, and so are the Sacraments. They have physical elements, the matter, for example, water, oil, bread, wine, and they have words spoken, called the form. It takes both the proper matter and the proper form to make the Sacrament valid. A priest or deacon would never use a Pepsi to baptize, because only water is the proper matter. A priest would never say “This is my vital fluid given up for you”, because that is not the proper form of the Eucharist.
A few other things about Sacraments in general that make them valid are that they are administered by the proper minister, although the efficacy of the Sacrament is not dependent upon that minister’s personal holiness. The minister of the Sacrament must have the intention of doing what the Church does, i.e. the minister intends to consecrate bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ and not into something else.

Adult recipients of the Sacraments must have the intention of receiving them and consent to their reception. When infants and children under the age of reason are baptized, it is the parents who give consent through the authority they have over their children. This authority is given by God. This is because Sacraments impose obligations on us and they confer grace, so God, being a gentleman, does not wish to impose those obligations or confer grace upon anyone without their consent. For instance, a couple receiving the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony has the obligation to live together in peace and love and to be faithful to one another. God would not impose these obligations on a couple without their consent.

All the Sacraments have an effect on us. Primarily, they confer grace to us, but three of them, Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Orders also produce in our soul a “character” which is an indelible spiritual mark by which we are claimed for God as His children and/or His ordained ministers. Because they mark us permanently, we never repeat the Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation or Holy Orders.

So, get ready, we will explore each of the Seven Sacraments monthly in terms of their matter and form, and their effects on us.  For now, reflect on some of the Sacraments you have received and how they have enabled you to live a more Christ-like life.