Five Principles for a Renewed Sacramental Theology

By Paul F. Ford

Sacraments are sacred signs. Sacraments are prayers. Sacraments are liturgies. Sacraments flow
from the proclaimed word of God. Sacraments are celebrated by and for those who share in the
one priesthood of Jesus Christ on behalf of the world. If we understood these five principles, we
would begin to grasp the implications of our Church’s renewed sacramental theology for our
musical and ritual choices, especially at Sunday Mass.

Invocation

It is a great privilege to be invited by the National Association of Pastoral Musicians to give

the first of this series of lectures honoring Robert Hovda. Over us all I invoke his passion for
liturgy and justice.
I also invoke the spirit of St. Irenaeus whose feast day we are celebrating today. Everyone
knows the gorgeous, lapidary sentence of Irenaeus: “The glory of God is the human being fully
alive; the life of the human being is the seeing of God.”1 But Irenaeus ought to be equally
famous for his earlier statement: “The glory of the human being is God; the work of God—and
the receptacle of all God’s wisdom and power—is the human being.”2 Our bodies, our selves:
We are the objects, the recipients, the “targets” of God’s work, God’s wisdom, and God’s power.
God is trying to get at us in every way possible; so although we are going to focus in this lecture
on the seven sacraments “of the new law” or sacraments “in the strict sense” (as the Catechism of
the Catholic Church refers to them), the fact that Irenaeus was getting at is that our whole life is
sacramental.

Sources

An underlying aim of this lecture is to suggest some essential reading so that we all can
better take into our bodies the work of God and, thus, God’s wisdom and power. If I could lead
you to a just few sources during the course of this presentation, I would want you to read first the
Catechism of the Catholic Church. Its beautifully written sections on the liturgy and sacraments
are the work of a great French theologian, the Melkite Dominican Jean Corbon, whose book The
Wellspring of Worship3 is the second source—in addition to the Catechism—that every pastoral
musician must chew over in lectio divina.4 As a theologian in Beirut, Father Corbon sits on the
frontier between East and West. For his entire life he has been answering the call of Pope John
Paul II: “The Church must learn to breathe again with its two lungs—the Eastern one and the
Western one.”5 Corbon has been breathing with both lungs for a very long time, but we in the
West have been pulmonarily impaired. We are very much in need of the sacramental theology of
the Eastern Church.
Corbon wrote some key paragraphs about the Holy Spirit (737 to 741) that summarize the
work of the Holy Spirit as the organizing principle of the entire Catechism, thus making the
Catechism one of the first products of the effort to breathe with both lungs. In parpagraph 737,
Corbon names four activities of the Holy Spirit: The Holy Spirit [1] prepares us and goes out to
us with his grace, in order to draw us to Christ. The Spirit [2] manifests the risen Lord to us,
recalls his word to us and opens our minds to the understanding of his death and resurrection.

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This same Spirit [3] makes present the mystery of Christ, supremely in the Eucharist, in order to
reconcile us and [4] to bring us into communion with God, that we may “bear much fruit.”
Put even more succinctly by my late mentor, Father Vincent Martin, OSB: “The Father speaks
His Word on His Breath.”6 No more than we can speak without breathing—but never breathe
without speaking or at least sighing—the Father has only one Word to speak and never says it
without his Breath.

Who Celebrates? And Why?

I am, as I promised, going to talk to you about the sacraments as signs, prayers, and liturgies
and about how they flow from the proclaimed word of God and are celebrated by and for those
who share in the one priesthood of Jesus Christ on behalf of the world. However, I am not going
to start with sacraments as signs because that is the hardest, most obscure part of sacramental
theology.7 I am going to start with an easy principle: who celebrates the sacraments and why we
celebrate.
I am married to a philosopher, thanks be to God, and I let her do the hard thinking. She says
that philosophers ask very precise questions and write very well-worded answers concerning
trivial matters and theologians think very sloppily and enthuse rhapsodically about things of the
utmost importance. Let me then enthuse by saying first of all that the sacraments are celebrated
by and for those who share in the one priesthood of Jesus Christ on behalf of the world. From the
very first dialogue in every sacramental liturgy—“The Lord be with you.”/“And also with
you.”—we are engaged in that wonderful volleyball game of liturgical prayer. This dialogue is
not a polite exchange: “Good morning.”/”How are you?” It is a two-way prayer. The presider—
who is a deacon, priest, or bishop—prays: “May the Lord who is the Spirit given to you in
baptism and confirmation be rekindled within you.” And we pray for the presider: “And the Lord
who is the Spirit given to you in the sacrament of orders be rekindled within you.” 8 Unlike a
volleyball game, in which we are setting up our team members to defeat the other side, the game
of liturgy is one in which we trying to set up the other side.
It is the Christian East that tells us that we cannot start any liturgy without this dialogue. I
attended a wonderful Orthodox chrismation of a man coming into Orthodoxy from Seventh-Day
Adventism. Father Paul greeted this big, middle-aged farmer at the door of the small church
(which had been converted from a clapboard home). Before Father Paul even opened the door,
he prayed in effect: “O God, help me mean what I am about to say and do. Help me be present to
what I am about to do.” Then he and the person to be chrismated went through these wonderful
rites of exorcism, turning to the West and spitting on Satan and coming into the church and being
received. Father Paul breathed on the waters, submersed his crucifix in the waters, and then
nearly drowned the farmer in the waters. (What he did next, when he chrismated him, I will say
in a few minutes.)
One of the things we can learn from the East is that, from the moment a sacrament begins, all
through a sacramental rite, and at the heart of every sacrament is the fact that sacraments are the
work of the Trinity. That is the first thing that we have to know— that God is at work.9
We talk a great deal about the real presence of Christ, especially in the Eucharist, but Herbert
Vorgrimler reminds us:

From a theological point of view there is only one presence of God, namely, God’s self-
communication to what is not God. But this presence is experienced and consciously

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 perceived in different types of presence, in which God’s presence as grace affects human
beings dynamically. This effect may always have different levels of intensity. The goal,
however, is always the same: genuine, grace-filled, personal communication between
human beings and God.
. . . In terms of Trinitarian theology we may say that the presence of God promised in
the liturgical assembly is not simply that eternal, ineffable divine mystery that Jesus
addressed as his Father and ours. It would be wrong to think that the liturgy makes God
the Father present. Instead, it is we (also) who in and by means of the liturgy are made
present to God the Father, are brought before his face: through his Son Jesus in the Holy
Spirit. The divine Spirit who is the common possession of Jesus and of the community is,
in the liturgy, the medium of the presence of Jesus, his person and the whole of his life
and fate. The precise ways in which this medium—the Spirit of God—is active in the
liturgy, bringing about the presence of Jesus in his person and actions, are the symbolic
actions of the church (or “effective signs”—preeminently the sacraments—as the
definition of liturgy cited above expresses it), in which Jesus is the real actor, the Word
whose voice is heard when it is proclaimed, read or meditated as the word of God, as also
in the prayer and song of the assembled community (SC 7).
It should be clear from what has been said that God’s becoming present through Jesus
in the Holy Spirit is effected through the initiative of the divine Spirit, and that initiative
is also the author of the faith of the Church, which is celebrating the liturgy. But this
making present of God reaches its goal only when the means of mediation, especially the
liturgy, are consciously and emotionally brought into awareness. Self-surrender to the
liturgy, whose basis and bearer is always Jesus Christ, means in every case (and thus in
every sacrament) remembering Jesus. Participation in the liturgy is a celebration of the
memory of Jesus, and its intensity depends on the Jesus-mysticism of the human being
who is taking part. That participation is always a self-surrender to the will of God
revealed in Jesus, and thus its intensity is also measured by one’s willingness to engage in
a praxis of life that accords with that of Jesus.10

In effect, God is never absent, but we may be. All the work of liturgy is to enable us to be
present.
God cannot fail to be present, otherwise we would go out of existence. If God had one of
those senior moments and forgot me, you would have an hour free to do something better in life
than attending this particular lecture. So God can’t cease to be present, but we need to learn how
to be really present to the work of God and the work of heaven in the liturgy. The work of liturgy
is not just the Trinity’s all by its lonesome. Of course the persons of the Trinity are not
lonesome—all of heaven is at work. As James Savage quoted so beautifully in his glorious 1999
speech at the Collegeville Conference on Liturgical Music on the liturgical role of the choir,
quoting the closing formulas of the prefaces of the entire liturgical year:

And so, as earth unites with heaven, while the joy of the resurrection renews the whole
world, now, today and every day of our lives,
in the temple of your glory, before your presence, in your presence,
through Christ our Lord, with thankful praise, with joyful hearts, with hearts full of love,
with steadfast love, in our joy, in our unending joy, with adoration and joy, in
company with, in communion with all the choirs of angels,

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 with angels, with angels and archangels, with the angels of heaven, with all the angels of
heaven, with the whole company of heaven, with the great army of angels, with the
choirs of heaven, with the angels and all the choirs of heaven, with the choirs of
angels and all the powers of heaven, with the angels and saints, with all the angels
and saints, with the apostles and all the angels and saints, with the hosts of heaven,
with the whole company of heaven,
we proclaim your glory, we worship in awe before your presence, we praise you for ever,
we sing, we sing the unending hymn of your praise, we sing your glory, we sing to
your glory, we sing forever to your glory, we praise and worship your glory, we
rejoice, we bless and praise your greatness, we praise your glory for ever, we glorify
the wonders of your power, we cry out with one voice, we adore and praise you for
ever, we join the angels and the saints, we echo on earth the song of the angels, we
blend our voices with theirs,
we join in their unending hymn of praise, we make their hymn of praise our own, we
offer their prayer of adoration, we join the angels in the hymn of endless praise, in the
triumphant hymn, in the hymn of praise, in the song of joy, in thankful praise, in the
hymn of your glory, in our joyful hymn of praise, in the new song of creation, in the
song of the angels in heaven, in their triumphant hymn of praise, in the unending
hymn of praise, for ever:
Holy, holy, holy . . . 11

I wept as I listened to that bold proclamation, the speaker wept, and the whole place fell apart,
yet all he did was to take all of the conclusions of all of the prefaces together. With all the angels
and saints, in other words, what are we doing? If you look at the various formulas for that in the
prefaces, we know that our liturgy is going on at many levels and is going on with our brothers
and sisters around the world. It is going on because we brought our own churches to church: We
brought our holy places (our bodies) and our own families to the gathered body of Christ and the
family of the Spirit.
So sacraments are celebrated by all of creation in this little place. Sacraments are celebrated
by those who share in the one priesthood of Jesus Christ on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus is the
principal celebrant, but, as Vincent Martin said, “He is the Word spoken on the Breath of God.”
Just as we cannot speak words without breath, so Eucharist is never is just the work of Jesus. As
Yves Congar complained,12 we Western Christians are functionally monotheists of the Second
Person: We do not know the Father or the Spirit. We are Christians to the exclusion of the Father
and the Spirit in some ways. But breathing with both lungs makes us aware that every sacrament
is a Trinitarian work that cascades from the Father through the Word in the Spirit and returns to
the Father through his Word on his Breath.
And we do liturgy, especially sacramental liturgy, not just for ourselves; we do it for the
world. If our liturgy does not transform us, if it does not produce a change in the world, it is
stillborn. Congar tells us that at every Mass—and the Mass is the sacrament of sacraments13—
something happens and something else begins to happen. St. Thomas gives the name of the first
kind of happening the Latin term res contenta, the thing done; the second is the res non contenta
(or the res significata).14
What is the res contenta at Mass—the act that is accomplished? It is the transformation of
this bread and this wine into the body and blood of Christ—in the West unleavened bread (the
bread of affliction) and wine (always the sign of our joy). They are also what earth has given and

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the fruit of the vine and what human hands have made—they represent our works, our joys, and
our sufferings. They are definitively transformed.
How transformed? One of the questions I want you to live with is that in some ways our
sacramental theology has been so distorted that some of us think that the bread and wine have
disappeared, and what remains is only Jesus. But the Eucharistic elements cannot be Jesus
without those signs. Those signs remain, as Herbert McCabe says to us in his beautiful essay
called “Eucharistic Change”15 which is in Nathan Mitchell’s book Real Presence: The Work of
the Eucharist.16 A second book about the Eucharist with which we should be familiar is Wine
and Bread by Sister Photina Rech, OSB, one of the unsung heroes of the liturgical renewal.17 She
was the colleague of the monks of Beuron Archabbey and Maria-Laach Abbey—the centers of
the liturgical movement in the German-speaking world. She wrote an incredible two-volume
work called Inbild Des Cosmos (The Key to the Cosmos), wherein she ransacked the fathers and
mothers of the Church for every significant thing they said about all the materials, gestures, and
postures we use in liturgy.
Back to the point: As Herbert McCabe tells us, the bread finally becomes bread when it
becomes the body of Christ. The wine finally becomes wine when it becomes the blood of
Christ. What bread and wine promises us, they can really never deliver. Whatever you had for
breakfast this morning is beginning to fade away. You are losing consciousness at this very
minute. The caffeine especially is not pulsating through your bodies any more. What did
whatever you ate this morning promise you? Life. But the fact is that we have to keep eating, for
our regular food doesn’t give us Life (Zöe in the Greek text of the New Testament); it gives us
Bios (life with a small l). We are all circling the drain, and we are paddling madly to avoid
drowning, but God knows this and so has been pouring into us Zöe through all of the sacraments,
especially through the bread and the wine that have been transformed by the experience of
Eucharist.18
Thomas Aquinas tells us that something does happen at every Eucharist: Is the res contenta.
But, he reminds us, in every sacrament there is also the res non contenta—something that begins
that we have responsibility for. The second epiclesis of all of our Eucharist Prayers (except the
Roman Canon, Eucharistic Prayer I) is called the “communion epiclesis.” It always asks, in some
way: “Make us one in mind and heart; Make us one body, one spirit in Christ.” The communion
epiclesis is all about helping us become something for the world. We become bread for the
world; we become the sign of joy and help people experience what they need to experience on a
daily basis. So we have become priests in baptism, and that priesthood sends us to the Eucharist.
Now I am going to say something very old fashioned, and I know that it is going to upset some
purists. I suggest that even though, in the purest form of Christian initiation, confirmation should
happen before Eucharist, I believe that it may not simply be accidental that it does often happen
after first Communion, at least for those who are baptized in infancy. This could be the work of
the Holy Spirit because I think that the sacrament of confirmation, interpreting Father
Vorgrimler’s statement that confirmation is “fundamental for all states of life and ministries in
the Church,”19 is the sacrament of vocation, the sacrament of mission. Even if it only began, as
Aidan Kavanagh says, as a dismissal rite from baptism into the Eucharist and it has been
misplaced,20 I think that confirmation, coming after the first sharing of Eucharistic Communion,
may serve as a dismissal to the rest of the world. “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” as
every Eucharist is trying to say.

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Sacraments Are Prayers

Now there is more to say about priesthood—the priesthood of Jesus and the priesthood of all
believers. But it is not obvious that we are all priests at worship, is it? How many people know
that the prayer of the faithful—which is part of every sacrament, every proclaimed Word—
should be included in every gathering for worship, even if it doesn’t issue forth in a sacrament.
In some ways, the prayer of the faithful is a quasi-sacrament.
The earliest document of the liturgical reform is the statement Oratio Universalis, which was
published just five months after the close of the Second Vatican Council. It restored the prayer of
the faithful and told us two things.21 The first is that this prayer needs to be part of every liturgy
of the Word, and the second is that a liturgy of the Word that doesn’t issue in prayer—the prayer
of the baptized—is not a complete liturgy. An ordained presider should not be praying this
prayer; it has to be so constructed that we (the baptized) are praying it. If you want a good idea of
how that might look and sound, take up The Book of Common Prayer (1979) and go to form two
of the “Prayers of the People.” A leader asks for the community’s prayers “for God’s people
throughout the world.” There is the call—“Pray for the Church—and then there is silence, and
you get the distinct impression that you should be praying for the Church, or for the people of all
the nations, or for those in need. There is no canned “Lord, hear our prayer” response to a spoken
(often inaudible) petition.22
How many of us have experienced, at least at daily Mass, the spontaneous petition “for a
special intention”? You often wonder what you have just prayed for. This is a true story that
happened at St. Joseph the Workman Parish in Berkeley, California. A British priest was
assisting for the summer. One day he answered the rectory doorbell and admitted a woman who
said: “I want you to say a Mass.” So he went to the office for the book of intentions and asked:
“What is the intention?” She said: “I want you to say Mass to curse my sister.” The priest said: “I
am afraid that I cannot do that.” She said: “I will pay you twenty dollars.” “It isn’t the amount of
money in question,” he replied, “it is the intention.” She was indigent and stormed out. About ten
minutes later the bell rang again, and the visiting priest went to the door, and there was the same
woman. She said” “I want to have a Mass said.” He asked what the intention might be, and she
said: “For a special intention.”
So we have to worry about the shape of our prayer, in particular the shape of the oratio
universalis (literally, the “universal prayer,” also known as the “general intercessions” or “prayer
of the faithful”), which is an act of prayer performed by the whole priestly people of God, the
baptized. The priest (or deacon) has two responsibilities: to excite prayer and to set it aflame. He
should have been doing that already, but at this point he does the first part through the invitation
to pray. He sets our prayer on fire through the brief concluding collect prayer that concludes the
common prayer, but he should not be orchestrating the prayer itself. Even though our deacons
traditionally read the intentions of this prayer, the shape of the petitions has to allow space for us
to pray. Every time we gather for common prayer, we join in the work of heaven, and we get to
play our part in that great work.
So the second point I want to make about sacraments is that they are prayers. That fact came
to me as a revelation because many of us experience liturgy as the last place where prayer is
taking place. Every one of the opportunities to pray within the liturgy involves a five-fold
process. That process begins with the priest’s call to kindle prayer in us through the invitation:
“Let us pray.” How do we take up that invitation? There is a wonderful old Irish priest in a parish
near where I live who, if he notices a restlessness in the room during the silence that follows this

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invitation to pray, will say” “You know, I can’t go on until you have prayed. Why did you come
here today, what is on your mind, what are you celebrating, what are you agonizing about? Pray
about that.” Then he goes back into silence. Then he proclaims the appointed prayer that
concludes our shared silence, addressing God and petitioning God. He concludes this vocal
prayer, and everyone adds their acclamation, as the General Instruction of the Roman Missal l
now says: “The people, uniting themselves to this entreaty, make the prayer their own with the
acclamation, Amen” (GIRM, no. 54). If they haven’t learned how to pray in the silences and in
the petitions of the prayer of the faithful, then many people won’t arrive at Eucharist spiritually
until the “Our Father!”

Sacraments Are Liturgies

Sacraments are prayers first, before they are liturgical prayer. One of the things I would like
to remind you is the theology of prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas outlined in the Summa
Theologiae:

Hence: 1. The Lord is said to hear the desire of the poor either because desire is the cause
of their petition, since a petition is [the interpreter of] desire, or to show how quickly the
poor are heard, for God hears the poor even before they offer a prayer, as it says in Isaiah,
Before they call, I will answer.

2. As stated above, the will moves reason to its goal; hence an act of reason can be
directed by the will to union with God which is the goal of charity. Prayer motivated by
charity tends toward God in two ways: first, in so far as the thing requested is concerned,
because when we pray we should ask principally to be united to God, as the Psalmist
says, One thing I ask of the Lord, this I seek, to dwell in the house of the Lord all the
days of my life, secondly, in so far as the one praying is concerned, because one ought to
approach the person from whom he requests something, either in place when from a man,
or in mind when from God. Hence Dionysius says, when we call upon God in our
prayers we unveil our mind in his presence, and in the same sense Damascene says,
prayer is the lifting up of the mind to God.23

Thomas stole this theology from Augustine, who stole it from Pseudo-Dionysus. The two
definitions of prayer in Question Eighty-three in the second part of the second part of the
Summa, is prayer as the interpreter of desire. In other words, you can’t pray unless you want
something. A lot of people don’t come expecting anything at Mass. Or maybe they do expect
something, but the flame of desire—and of prayer—hasn’t been kindled. They haven’t been
reminded that prayer is the interpreter of desire and that, until we have desires, we can’t pray.
The second thing that Thomas reminds us of, borrowing from Pseudo-Dionysus, is that
prayer is the unveiling of ourselves before God. (From this insight we get the catechism
definition of prayer as the “lifting up” of our hearts and minds to God, but the oldest version of
this image speaks of “unveiling” ourselves.) What did Adam and Eve do when they sinned?
They clothed themselves, they “veiled” themselves before God. In prayer we “unveil” and
become our most real self. But often the language we are given for prayers is so august that we
think we have to dance madly before God to get the divine attention. We don’t have to do that;
all we have to do is take off our clothes. (Please do not go and say that the best way to pray

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liturgically is naked!) What I mean is this: If we don’t realize that sacraments are prayer, we are
lost, and we don’t know what we are doing. They are, of course, public prayer, so we have to
exercise a little decorum (in the vesture department as in other ways), but they are prayer of a
very special kind. They are epicleses, effective invocations: The Father always hears the prayer.
Celebrated worthily in faith, the sacraments confer the grace that they signify. They are
efficacious because in them Christ himself is at work through the Holy Spirit. It is Christ who
baptizes, who acts in the sacraments in order to communicate the grace that each sacrament
signifies. The Catechism says that “the Father always hears the prayer of his Son’s Church”—
that is the epiclesis of every sacrament, and every sacrament has an epiclesis, even though it may
not have words. (Unfortunately there isn’t an explicit epiclesis in the marriage rite, but the East
tells us in the holding of hands out over the couple and the crowning of the bride and groom is
the epiclesis.) In the epiclesis of each sacrament, the Church expresses her faith in the power of
the Spirit.
One of the earliest gifts God gave me, as a consequence of my trying to be a monk, was
noticing the difference between Matthew and Luke in their telling of Jesus’ words about asking
and receiving. Matthew’s version (7:7–11) ends with this sentence: “If you then who are evil
know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give
good things to those who ask him!” Luke’s version (11:9–13), influenced by Luke’s theology of
the Holy Spirit, concludes this way: “If you then who are evil, know how to give good gifts to
your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit [or, in some
versions, ‘will the Father give the Holy Spirit from heaven’] to those who ask him!”
How do we ask for the Holy Spirit, and what do we ask the Spirit to do when we ask? We ask
in Eucharistic Prayer II: “Let your Spirit come upon these gifts to make them holy.” That’s easy
for the Spirit to do. The bread and wine, very humble, get themselves out of the way and become
what they always wanted to be. But when we ask, in the second epiclesis in that same prayer,
that “all of us who share in the body and blood of Christ be brought together in unity by the Holy
Spirit,” that’s a much harder task for the Spirit to accomplish. It’s easy for the Spirit to transform
the bread and wine, to let them “become for us the body and blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ.”
It’s much harder for us to become one body, one spirit in Christ. If we want unity to take place in
the Church, it is the Holy Spirit’s work. It is hard to be Catholic; it’s so easy to be non-Catholic.
There is a centrifugal force pulling us out of unity all the time, and we are constantly pulled out
of our best selves, and the Spirit has got to work overtime to pull us back. That is the res non
contenta of every sacrament, and that is what the Holy Spirit is trying to do to us. This is the
surefire prayer, the prayer that God cannot fail to hear: “Father, in the name of your son Jesus,
send your Holy Spirit.”
That is what an epiclesis is. The reason why sacraments work is not because they are acts ex
opere operato (that is, they are effective just by being performed), for that’s where people get the
mistaken idea that sacraments are magic. Sacraments are prayers; they don’t happen
automatically. They happen when the Church asks: “Father, in the name of your son Jesus, send
your Holy Spirit.” The Father always hears the prayer of his Son’s Church. You might demur
and say he is hearing but is not saying “yes.” The Father always says yes to the prayer for the
Spirit, and that is why the sacraments work.
Now I am going to say something rather bold: It is through the Holy Spirit that sacraments
work outside the context of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. It could be that God
is ordaining women in other Christian communions because of the prayer for the Holy Spirit.
Our friends beyond the bounds of the Roman communion of Churches are asking the Father to

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send the Spirit in the name of Jesus. Is God going to say, “No way; I have an appointment with
the Catholics today”? No. So our unity is shattered, broken, but it is also a real unity. Something
real is happening. Even the Catechism (no.1400) suggests—almost says—that something real is
happening in ecclesial communities other than ours.24
We have been talking about the sacrament as prayers, particularly as liturgical prayers, and as
liturgies they assume an assembly. That is why it is good, even for the anointing of the sick, to
draw a crowd. Even though we don’t yet believe this is the case in the sacrament of
reconciliation, we draw a crowd. Crowds are required in liturgy, and as liturgies these prayers
presume song. They presume proclamation, solemnity, intercession, gesture, and ritual activity.
No longer shall we be content with the minimalist activity going on in most of our Roman
Catholic churches. Robert Hovda and so many others have been inviting us for decades to use
our signs lavishly so that we understand what we are doing. It is through our bodies that our
bodies know what God is up to in the universe.

Sacraments Flow from the Proclaimed Word of God

When I was growing up, the readings were read or chanted in Latin, and they were repeated
in the local vernacular just before the priest’s sermon, and they were never referred to from that
point on. The sermon (if there was one) could have focused on anything; it was not required that
the preacher even give lip service to the texts just proclaimed. Although we have a new
Lectionary and a call for homilies that provide “a living commentary on the word . . . as part of
the liturgical action” (GIRM, 30), the deadest letter of the Second Vatican Council is not the
Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy but the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation.
“Deadest” is much too strong a description: We are still in the initial phases of the renewal of the
Roman Catholic Church, and much may yet happen. That dogmatic constitution tells us that
everything is the fruit of the word of God. It is reflection in the first ten paragraphs of the 1981
revised version of the Introduction to the Lectionary for Mass (which we received in 1999, when
we finally received the second edition of our Lectionary—much tampered with). But many of us
have not yet read this Introduction, especially its first paragraphs. These are not the passionate
meanderings of a starved celebrate in Rome; this text is the first fruit of a deepening awareness
that we cannot live without the word of God.
Isn’t it wonderful how in Dies Domini Pope John Paul II described the fourth century martyrs
of Sunday—St. Saturninus and his companions in Abatina in North Africa. We need to restore
their memory through an obligatory memorial on February 12, those forty-nine women and men
who were hauled off during the middle of the liturgy, taken first in front of the local authority.
Their books had already been burned before they began that liturgy, so they didn’t have any
lectionary to read from, but the readers knew the readings by heart. Saturninus Junior was one of
the lectors. The liturgy had begun in the house of St. Emeritus, a wealthy man who risked
everything by having Eucharist in his home. When they were arrested, the magistrate asked this
rich man: “What were you doing? You were forbidden to do this.” St. Emeritus responded:
“Without Sunday we cannot be.” Hilarion, who was four or five years old, said: “I was at the
collects.” (Notice that is what he called Mass. He knew the structure of “let us pray” and silence
to let him pray about his little concerns which are so big in the life of our little ones.) These
people knew that the Word needed to be taken in deeply, that every liturgy is “founded on the
word of God and [is] sustained by it [and so] becomes a new event and enriches the word itself
with new meaning and power”—as paragraph three says in the Introduction to the Lectionary.

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 This language, though in typical Vaticanese, need passionate affirmation. Though the text
(which applies to every lectionary, including those for all the sacraments and other liturgies)
affirms that “every liturgical celebration is founded primarily on the word of God,” that is not yet
true. Even though Music in Catholic Worship and Liturgical Music Today tell us to start with
some of the readings in preparing and selecting music for worship, what do some of us do? Our
eyes glaze over, and we think “I have been here before, and anyway I like this song.” “Founded
primarily on the word of God and sustained by it”: When this happens, the liturgical celebration
“becomes a new event and enriches the word itself with new meaning and power.” There is a
reciprocal relationship between event and proclamation.
The proclamation enables the event to happen, and the event returns to the proclamation a
new sense of what is going on. So the most important choice we can make for Sunday Eucharist
is the Communion song, if we understand that the Communion song needs to be taken from the
Gospel of the day. When Augustine said that the Eucharist is “a visible word”—also a tastable
and smellable word (the wine)—he meant that the words that consecrate the bread and the wine
are not just “this is my body” and “this is my blood.” That is a minimalist interpretation of the
Eucharistic Prayer. Remember that when St. Thomas Aquinas sat down to write the Summa,
there were twenty-one candidates for sacramental status. Of course, seduced by the neatness of
the number seven, he distilled all those candidates into seven formal sacraments. Then he
distilled what happens at sacraments into matter and form. For many of us, Aquinas’
philosophical categories imply an approach to liturgy that is about the littlest matter possible and
the littlest form possible. In the case of Eucharistic consecration, that means the words of
institution. For Augustine and everyone up to the time of Thomas, on the other hand, all the
words of the Lord at Eucharist are consecratory.
So this Eucharist is never the same old thing. This Eucharist has been changed by this Word.
So this coming Sunday, if we are not singing an echo of the Gospel and the other readings at
Communion, we have let the people of God down, because they will not know yet what this
Word has done to this bread and this wine. And that is an exchange that is happening to all in the
sacraments—the proclaimed Word shapes the sacrament, and the act of making sacrament
transforms our hearing of the Word.
The sacraments flow from the proclaimed word of God; every liturgy of the Word makes a
promise that the sacrament fulfills. So we have to establish for ourselves and others the
connection between the promise and the answer to that promise. Remember, though, that it is an
answer that is in two stages. God always delivers on the promise. What is the essential promise
of every liturgy of the Word? It is the promise of the three words from the burning bush (Exodus
3:14), ehyeh asher ehyeh—“I shall be there (for you) as Who I am shall I be there (for you)”—in
the wonderful translation of John Courtney Murray, SJ.25 The three words of that YHWH uses to
describe the divine being mean something like: “I shall be there for you with all of my power as
who I am shall I be there for you” (and simply the familiar translation “I am who am.”) Thus
God’s name is a promise of active, powerful, caring presence. He definitely delivered on that
promise in Yeshuah (the Hebrew name rendered as Jesus, which means “YH[WH] is saving us
right now”), the Emmanuel (“God with us”).26 He continues to deliver on that promise by ever-
sending the Promised One, the Holy Spirit, to be with us forever. 27 “Let your spirit come upon
these gifts and make them holy,” we pray. Come upon us and make us one in mind and one in
heart.
The bottom line of every liturgy of the Word has got to be some promise—the renewal of
God’s promise “I will be with you.” So when we go to Communion or share in any other

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sacrament, God is with us in a new way. Sacraments presume faith, of course, so all I am saying
here is that one of the biggest roles we have as pastoral liturgist is to enable our people to be
present to the Real Presence. In every way possible, we need to be there because God is there—
The Holy One can’t fail to be there. What is God’s response when we ask: “Father, in the name
of your Son, Jesus, send your Holy Spirit”? Is God going to say: “I’ll think about it”? No. God is
a cataract, as C. S. Lewis says. God is a waterfall, a Niagara Falls. The outpouring just comes.
We have to work really hard to keep God out, but we are pretty successful, aren’t we? We have
to take advantage of every opportunity to awaken our people to how much God wants to be there
for them.

Sacraments Are Signs

Confirmation is the most impoverished sacrament that we have, I think, yet it uses one of the
most lavish signs, but because we use that sign so poorly we don’t know what we are doing. Let
me tell you about my most disgraceful experience of the sacrament of confirmation. (All of us
have horror stories.) I have a dear godson whom I met at Loyola Marymount University in Los
Angeles, where I was teaching. He was a wonderful pagan who decided to become a Christians.
After completing the process of adult initiation with some other candidates, he was ready for
sacramental initiation at Easter. However, at this university the students are off for Easter, so we
did it the following week. We did a vigil service in broad daylight. (The phase “as helpless as a
Jesuit in Holy Week” really comes alive when you participate in something like this.) There was
a birch table with no cloth on it, wheeled out from the sacristy, and topped with a plastic punch
bowl. The young people to be baptized were not immersed, though I think they were at least
sprinkled. Then, as at the Vigil, they were to be presented with the light of Christ. A Jesuit, with
his back toward the assembly, was furiously trying to light the candles with his cigarette lighter,
while I, the sponsor, was standing across the sanctuary from him and whispering: “Light it from
the Easter candle!” That’s what finally happened, but then it was time for confirmation. From the
sacristy, the sacristan brought a petri dish containing the oldest chrism in Christendom. I don’t
know what was living on its surface, but the presider used it to confirm every one of these people
with the smallest cross possible. Naturally, the good sister who had taken these people all
through the rites came behind him with a cotton ball and wiped off what little chrism had been
placed on each forehead.
Now look at what the Catechism says about oil: Oil “is a sign of an abundance of joy; it
cleanses (anointing before and after a bath) and limbers (the anointing of athletes and wrestlers);
oil is a sign of healing, since it is soothing to bruises and wounds; and it makes radiant with
beauty, health, and strength” (no. 1293).
I have to take my students on a field trip to experience a crushing of grapes, since most of us
think that wine is something that happens in the supermarket. We actually have to bake bread;
we actually have to harvest the wheat and the grapes. The San Jose Dominican sisters have
revitalized the 427 olives trees that Padre Serra planted, and they are harvesting the olives now
for use in the sacred Chrism. I want to take my students to see the harvest because we have to see
all of these as the work of human hands and know the glory of olive oil.
What then do we do with the olive oil? Paragraph 1300 of the Catechism explains that “in the
Latin rite, ‘the sacrament of confirmation is conferred through the anointing with chrism on the
forehead, which is done by the laying on of the hand” and with words stolen from the East:
“Accipe signaculum doni Spiritus Sancti” (“Be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit”). On the

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other hand, this same paragraph describes in the next sentence what happens with this oil in the
Eastern Churches. “After a prayer of epiclesis the more significant parts of the body are anointed
with myron [consecrated by the patriarch]: forehead, eyes, nose, ears, lips, breast, back, hands,
and feet.” I saw this farmer chrismated by the Orthodox, and if they could have stripped his
clothes off him again, he would have been slicker. The whole idea is that we are holy from head
to foot.
I am going to propose to the Roman Rite bishops in the United States that we stole the words,
now let us do the rites. Let’s have the laying of the hands by every confirmed person in the room.
I think we should cancel all of our Masses in the deanery and in cities we need to rent stadiums
and turn them into outside cathedrals. Make sure that people who have been to Mass recently
attend, because isn’t one of the problems at confirmation the fact that relatives and friends come
who are not very comfortable with places like churches? Such people need to be surrounded by
us and every confirmed person needs to have, the way they do in Protestant ordination
ceremonies, the laying-on of hands by all the confirmed. If baptism can be conferred by a person
who isn’t even baptized, can’t confirmation be co-conferred by all of us who are confirmed?
That is what I am suggesting. Then when the bishop comes and all the priests and deacons—
deacons are allowed to use chrism even if chrism is not allowed in their ordination—then I really
believe that we need to emblazon the bodies of all of these people with chrism on the head, eyes,
ears, nose, and breast. The whole idea of putting oil on our chest is that it drips down to our
private parts, for they are holy too. How many people still get out of your line at Communion
and go to Father’s line because his hands are holier than yours? If we knew about the real
meaning of confirmation through the rich use of anointing, then we would know that every
person gathered for Eucharist is holy right down to their calluses. What are kids doing when they
get themselves pierced, what are they doing when they get tattooed? They want to be changed;
they want to be touched. What is the oil doing? It is meant to saturate, to soak in, and so every
effort that we can make at these liturgies should be directed toward using these signs lavishly so
that people can understand them.
The chief point that Nathan Mitchell makes in his book The Real Presence—quoting Herbert
McCabe, who went to heaven much too soon, and who was writing about Eucharist—is that all
the signs we use—oil, water, wine, bread, sexual activity, forgiveness, healing—finally become
what they are when they are made sacraments. We can understand our sacraments better by
looking through the signs to what they are trying to say. Ronald Knox titled his book on the
Eucharist The Window in the Wall28 (which you should not read because it is well-intentioned
but almost entirely invented—you would not believe how he accounts for the origins of the
various parts and gestures of the Mass!). Knox’s chief metaphor is still the best — The Eucharist
is a window in which we look into eternity, through which eternity reaches into the present
moment. All of our sacraments are that.

A Final Paradigm

Finally, let me introduce to you the paradigm for all the sacraments in the Catechism. This
paradigm is the Magnificat antiphon for Second Vespers of the Solemnity Corpus et Sanguinis
Christi, written by St. Thomas Aqunias: “O sacrum convivium, in quo Christus sumitur,
recolitur memoria passionis ejus, mens impletur gratia, et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur”
(“O holy banquet in which Christ is consumed, the memory of his passion is recalled, the mind is
filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.”) Aquinas is saying is that in every

12
sacrament something happens in the present moment, something from the past comes into the
present, and something from the future comes into the present.29 Sacraments operate in past,
present and future; they operate as faith, love, and hope.
Clearly, I haven’t covered all that a pastoral musician needs to know about sacramental
theology, but I have tried to emphasis that sacraments are the work of heaven, the work of the
entire priesthood. I have tried to say that they are the fruit of the proclaimed word of God. I have
tried to say that sacraments are prayers and they work because they are prayers. I have tried to
say that sacraments are signs—holy signs, natural signs—and that we have to look at the signs to
understand what they are, and that we have to use these signs lavishly.
If I haven’t made too much sense, my email address and my website address accompany this
text. There are many essays on sacramental theological on my website. Maybe some of this stuff
was “duh” for you; but it’s often the most obvious things that we overlook. For me my discovery
was sacraments are prayers. I have been saying “duh” and “wow” every since.

Notes

1. “Gloria Dei vivens homo; vita hominis visio Dei.” Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus
Haereses IV 20, 7.
2. “Gloria hominis, Deus; operatio vero Dei, et omnis sapientiæ eius, et virtutem
receptaculum, homo.” Adversus Haereses III 20, 2.
3. Jean Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship, second edition (San Francisco, California:
Ignatius Press, 2005).. Read excerpts at http://rumkatkilise.org/wellsprings.htm and an essay,
“Jean Corbon and the Catechism,” at http://rumkatkilise.org/corbon.htm. Corbon teaches liturgy
and ecumenism at the University of the Holy Spirit in Kalik, Lebanon, and the University of St.
Joseph in Beirut. He is secretary of the Ecumenical Commission of the Assembly of the
Patriarchs and the Catholic Bishops of Lebanon.
4. C. S. Lewis is famous for saying, “For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books
often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same
experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when
they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion would find that the heart sings unbidden
while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a
pencil in their hand.” This comment appears in “On the Reading of Old Books” in God in the
Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans,
1970), 200–207, here 205.
5. “La Chiesa deve imparare di nuovo a respirare con i suoi due polmoni, quello orientale
e quello occidentale.” John Paul II, Speech to the College of Cardinals, June 28, 1985
(http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/1985/june/documents/hf_jp-
ii_spe_19850628_sacro-collegio_it.html), §8, ¶4.
6. See http://www.valyermo.com/mnk-vin1.html. Vincent Martin was an ardent student of the
writings of St. Irenaeus and of an early Christian theology still in contact with the synagogue; see
his A House Divided: The Parting of the Ways between Synagogue and Church (New York, New
York: Paulist Press, 1995). Martin was a personal friend of Yves Congar, who wrote: The Spirit
“is the communion between the Father and the Son, but he is first of all the Breath of God. The
Son is the Image, but he is first of all the Word coming from the mouth of the Father and
accompanied by the Breath, and therefore accompanied by the power that sets things in motion.”
Yves Congar, OP, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, Volume III: The River of Life Flows East and West

13
(New York, New York: Crossroads, 19830, 148. Or, as Congar says more succinctly: “The entire
life of the Church is unfolding in the breath of the Spirit of Pentecost.” Congar, I Believe in the
Holy Spirit, Volume I: The Experience of the Spirit (New York: Crossroads, 1983), 172.
7. For more about the sacraments as signs, read Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and
Sacrament: Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville, Minnesota: The
Liturgical Press, 1995) or his more accessible volume, The Sacraments: The Word of God at the
Mercy of the Body (Collegeville, The Liturgical Press, 2001). See also Antonio Donghi, Actions
and Words: Symbolic Language and the Liturgy (Collegeville, The Liturgical Press, 1997).
8. When lay people preside, they do not use this prayer; they do not use the orans gesture
in praying the orations, and they do not trace the sign of the cross in the air in blessing the
assembly or anyone or anything else. See the pertinent places in the Liturgy of the Hours, the
Book of Blessings, and similar ritual books. See my “Overview to the Introduction to the Book of
Blessings,” The Liturgy Documents, Volume Two, ed. David Lysik (Chicago, Illinois: Liturgy
Training Publications, 2000), 346–350; available at
http://www.pford.stjohnsem.edu/ford/courses/sacramental-
theology/docs/Blessings%20Intros.pdf. See also my essay, “‘The Lord who is the Spirit be with
you’—‘And may the Spirit be also with you’: Some Pre-Pentecost Ponderings,” AIM (Summer
2001), 22–27; available at
http://www.pford.stjohnsem.edu/ford/courses/ecclesiology/docs/on%20Holy%20Spirit%20for%
20AIM.pdf
9. Here we may need to revise Søren Kierkegaard’s justly famous insight: “Many
Christians tend to view the minister/priest as the actor, God as the prompter, and the
congregation as the audience. But actually, the congregation is the actor, the minister/priest
merely the prompter, and God the audience.” Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing,
New York, New York: Harper & Row, 1956), 180–181. Actually God is working in the
assembly and in the ministers.
10. The best-organized and most accessible textbook in sacramental theology is Herbert
Vorgrimler’s Sacramental Theology (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1992), here
25–26.
11. James Savage, “On the Liturgical Role of the Choir,” Saint John’s University,
Collegeville, Minnesota, “At the Lamb’s High Feast We Sing,” June 13–17, 1999; expanded in
his plenum presentation at the 2004 NPM Central Regional Convention in Chicago, Illinois; and
published as the closing paragraphs of his article, “What Do We Sing Now?” Pastoral Music
(October/November 2004).
12. Yves Congar, OP, "Pneumatologie ou christomonisme dans la tradition latine?" in
Ecclesia a Spiritu Sancto edocta, Lumen Gentium. Mélanges théologiques. Hommage á Mgr. G.
Philips, ed. E. Descamps (Gembloux: Duculot, 1970), 41–63; cited in Walter Kasper,
“Ecclesiological and Ecumenical Implications of Baptism,” The Ecumenical Review, October,
2000, note 22.
13. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, English translation of the Catechism of
the Catholic Church prepared for the United States of America, hereafter CCC (Washington,
DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1994), no. 1211.
14. Congar says:

I would like to have what Thomas Aquinas meant by res non contenta investigated
more closely. Examples concerning other sacraments would lead me to think that it

14
 means the effect to which the sacrament points (res significata), but what is not obtained
or produced by the sacramental act alone. It calls for the intervention of another energy. It
is true that the sacrament of the Eucharist . . . is brought about by the consecration of the
bread and wine and their “conversion” into the body and blood of Christ. In that sense,
the spiritual fruit of the sacrament, which takes place in the one who receives
communion, is “extrinsic” to it. Thomas, however, knew that a sacrament was “the sign
of a sacred reality insofar as it sanctifies men,” in other words, that the spiritual fruit
belonged to the sacrament and that it was its res or “thing.” . . . But . . . if the sacrament is
to have, in the life of Christians, its “reality,” that is, the fruit to which it points, what is
required is an intervention on the part of the Spirit, who is, in us, the author of charity.
And that charity is paschal, it is of the Church, and it is orientated towards God’s work in
the world and towards his kingdom. Jesus is in us, but, if his sacramental presence is to
have its effect, the Holy Spirit must add his breath, his fire and his dynamism.

Congar, “The Holy Spirit in Our Communion with the Body and Blood of Christ,” in I Believe in
the Holy Spirit, III: The River of Life Flows in the East and in the West (London: Chapman, 1983
and New York: Seabury, 1983), 266.
15. Herbert McCabe, “Eucharistic Change,” Priests & People 8:6 (June 1994), 217–221.
16. Nathan Mitchell, Real Presence: The Work of the Eucharist (Chicago, Illinois:
Liturgy Training Publications, 2001).
17. Photina Rech, OSB, Wine and Bread, trans. Henz R. Kuehn (Chicago: Liturgy
Training Publications, 1998). Kuehn wrote a brief, affectionate biography of Rech in the
Introduction to this volume.
18. This distinction between Bios and Zöe is the foundation of Book IV, “Beyond
Personality: First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity,” of Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.
19. Vorgrimler, Sacramental Theology, 130.
20. Aidan Kavanagh, OSB, Confirmation: Origins and Reform (New York/Collegeville:
Pueblo, 1988), especially Chapter Two.
21. Consilium, The Universal Prayer or Prayer of the Faithful, April 17, 1966 (Vatican
Polyglot Press, 1966). English translation in International Commission on English in the Liturgy,
Documents on the Liturgy 1963–1975: Conciliar, Papal, and Curial Texts (herafter DOL), ed.
and trans. Thomas C. O’Brien (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1982), no. 239,
section 4.

The place proper to the prayer of the faithful is at the end of every celebration of the word of
God; as a rule it takes place even if the eucharistic sacrifice is not to follow . . . .
The reason is that this prayer is the fruit, as it were, of the working of the word of God in
the hearts of the faithful: instructed, stirred and renewed by the word, all stand together to
offer prayer for the needs of the whole Church and the whole world.
Thus there is an analogy: sacramental communion is the conclusion and, in regard to the
people’s participation, the climax of the liturgy of the eucharist; the prayer of the faithful,
according to the witness of antiquity, appears as the conclusion and, in regard to the people’s
participation, the climax of the entire liturgy of the word. . . .
But the prayer can also be seen in another way as a hinge between the two parts of the
Mass: it terminates the liturgy of the word in which God’s wonderful works and the Christian

15
 calling are brought to mind; it ushers in the liturgy of the eucharist by stating some of those
general and particular intentions for which the sacrifice is to be offered.

22. See Paul Ford, “Let My People Pray: The Theology and Practice of the Universal
Prayer (a.k.a. the General Intercessions or the Prayer of the Faithful),” Liturgical Life, the
publication of the Office for Worship of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, May 1992. Available
at
http://www.pford.stjohnsem.edu/ford/courses/ecclesiology/docs/Ford%20Let%20my%20people
%20pray.pdf.
23. St. Thomas Aqunias, Summa Theologiæ, IIª-IIae q. 83 a. 1 ad 1:

Ad primum ergo dicendum quod desiderium pauperum dicitur dominus exaudire, vel quia
desiderium est causa petendi, cum petitio sit quodammodo desiderii interpres. Vel hoc
dicitur ad ostendendum exauditionis velocitatem, quia scilicet dum adhuc aliquid in
desiderio pauperum est, Deus exaudit, antequam orationem proponant; secundum illud
Isaiae LXV, eritque, antequam clament, ego exaudiam.

IIª-IIae q. 83 a. 1 ad 2:
Ad secundum dicendum quod, sicut supra dictum est, voluntas movet rationem ad suum
finem. Unde nihil prohibet, movente voluntate, actum rationis tendere in finem caritatis,
qui est Deo uniri. Tendit autem oratio in Deum quasi a voluntate caritatis mota,
dupliciter. Uno quidem modo, ex parte eius quod petitur, quia hoc praecipue est in
oratione petendum, ut Deo uniamur; secundum illud Psalm., unam petii a domino, hanc
requiram, ut inhabitem in domo domini omnibus diebus vitae meae. Alio modo, ex parte
ipsius petentis, quem oportet accedere ad eum a quo petit, vel loco, sicut ad hominem; vel
mente, sicut ad Deum. Unde dicit ibidem quod, quando orationibus invocamus Deum,
revelata mente adsumus ipsi. Et secundum hoc etiam Damascenus dicit quod oratio est
ascensus intellectus in Deum. (Emphasis added in bold.)

24. CCC, no. 1400: “Ecclesial communities derived from the Reformation and separated
from the Catholic Church, ‘have not preserved the proper reality of the Eucharistic mystery in its
fullness, especially because of the absence of the sacrament of Holy Orders.’ It is for this reason
that Eucharistic intercommunion with these communities is not possible for the Catholic Church.
However these ecclesial communities, ‘when they commemorate the Lord's death and
resurrection in the Holy Supper . . . profess that it signifies life in communion with Christ and
await his coming in glory.’ ” (Emphasis added in italic.)
25. John Courtney Murray, SJ, The Problem of God (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale,
1960), 9–16.
26. Matthew 1:21 and 23 respectively.
27. John 14:16.
28. Ronald Knox, The Window in the Wall and Other Sermons on the Holy Eucharist
(New York and London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1956).
29. See CCC, no. 1130.

Bibliography

16
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, English
translation for the United States of America (Washington, DC: United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops, 1994), nos. 721–726, 737–741, 1066–1206.

Corbon, Jean, OP. The Wellsprings of Worship (San Francisco, California, Ignatius Press, 2005).

Grün, Anselm, OSB. The Seven Sacraments (New York, New York: Continuum, 2003).

Mitchell, Nathan. Real Presence: The Work of Eucharist (Chicago, Illinois: Liturgy Training
Publications, 2001).

Rech, Photina, OSB. Wine and Bread (Chicago, Illinois: Liturgy Training Publications, 1998).

Vorgrimler, Herbert. Sacramental Theology (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press,

1992).

Dr. Paul F. Ford is a professor of systematic theology and liturgy at St. John Seminary,
Camarillo, California. A member of the five-composer Collegeville Composers Group, who are
producing Psallite: Sacred Songs for Liturgy and Life (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical
Press, 2005, 2006, and 2007), Dr. Ford is the author of By Flowing Waters: Chant for the Liturgy
(The Liturgical Press, 1999). He is an internationally recognized expert on the life and writings
of C. S. Lewis and author of the award-winning book, Companion to Narnia (now in its fifth
edition, HarperCollins, 2005) and of the Pocket Companion to Narnia (HarperCollins, 2005). Dr.
Ford is married to the philosopher Janice Daurio, Ph.D. He may be reached at
[email protected] and his website is http://www.pford.stjohnsem.edu/.

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