I feel at ease with your understanding of sin not a question of guilt/punishment, but of love accepted or rejected.

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1 Sent Sat 3/8/2008 3:08 PM Joe, Sorry to be so long in responding. I have read [your presentation] and find it very interesting. It must reach out to the audiences you present it to. The pattern of past, present, future keeps it very understandable and relevant. But I cannot say that I found it dangerous in any aspect. You will have to enlighten me on that point. I teach sacraments on a rather regular basis and find very similar emphases in your approach. Sacrament, as I use it, is a very broad term, including those things, events, and persons who reveal the presence of God to us and express God's overwhelming love for us. Those who experience that presence and love can respond to the invitation to live in union with God and neighbor. Jesus is the most powerful sacrament revealing and expressing God in human terms and responding by following a way of life which leads to union. Those who come to know Jesus and follow his way of life come together as community church to be sacrament for the world. In addition to the opening up of the concept of sacrament, you focus on the role of symbol those special ways in which we are put in touch with the realities of faith and divine love. The ritual actions of the Christian community are means of identity and commitment means of healing and reconciling as we meet the challenges and opportunities of daily life. I feel at ease with your understanding of sin not a question of guilt/punishment, but of love accepted or rejected. Sacramental actions are presented as celebrations of saving activity in our lives not procedures of cause>effect. The emphasis is on the life that we live sacraments enable and encourage it. Again, you need to tell me where your ideas are dangerous. What are you planning as a major theme [when you speak at the CTS convention in Newport]? Hopefully, the ideas you see as challenging, in order to trigger some good discussion. My best wishes for a successful event. Mary Peter

2 Sent Sun 3/9/ :57 AM Hi, Mary Peter. I must admit that I developed this presentation, not with any subversive intent, but only to make sacraments intelligible to people who might have to explain them to others in a parish setting, namely, ecclesial lay ministers. I found that the presentation went over so well, and it appealed to listeners on such a basic level (with participants paired up and sharing their stories with one another) that I could use it with undergraduate and graduate students, with life-long Catholics and catechumens as well. It was only after retiring from full-time teaching, when I embarked on a project of typing up (with an eye to eventually publishing) some of the talks and other presentations that I have given over the years, that I began noticing some of the implications of what people discover when they go through this workshop with me. I think what they discover are many of the things you mentioned in what you wrote to me on Saturday. They can understand the sacramentality of nature, and how Jesus can be a sacrament of God. They also see for themselves that virtually all ceremonies (There may be exceptions, but I haven't found them.) have past, present and future referents, and using this simple heuristic, they can understand how rituals express something that is going on in the present, how they are grounded in the life and ministry of Christ, and how they relate to an idea that is often rather elusive the kingdom (or reign) of God. Moreover, by reflecting on symbols that are personally meaningful to them souvenirs, photographs, smells from childhood, favorite songs, and so on they first experience and then understand how symbols not only evoke memories but also reconnect them with spiritual realities ideas and ideals, values and principles that are important (sacred) to them in how they view the world and try to live their lives. Generalizing on this personal insight, they can then perceive how the Church's symbolic rituals are meant to connect and reconnect them with spiritual realities that are central to Christianity. In a way, this is an utterly simple and totally plausible approach to sacraments because people are able to verify it for themselves and see not only how symbols work but also why the Catholic tradition claims that its sacraments are effective signs. But the approach works, in part, because it leaves out something that is present in the Catechism and in canon law, namely, the concept of a sacramental reality that is bestowed when a sacrament is administered, and that is therefore received by the so-called recipient of the sacrament. (I am sure you recognize this language from your earlier religious training, even though few contemporary theologians talk this way.) Reflecting on this discovery, it appears to me that the concept of the sacramental reality is a bit like phlogiston and aether, which are terms from the history of science. Phlogiston was posited to exist in things like wood and leaves and other things that are able to burn; rocks, earth and water, according to this hypothesis, had no phlogiston in them. But when scientists in the 17th century figured out that burning was a matter of rapid oxidation, and that the common element in 1

3 burnable things was carbon or some other element that could chemically combine with oxygen, the concept of phlogiston was discarded. Likewise, scientists since Isaac Newton knew that light rays behaved like waves (Remember Newton's experiment with a glass prism that bent a white ray of light into the different colors of the rainbow?), but since sound waves require a medium such as air or water through which to travel (You can't hear noise in a vacuum.), scientists posited that interplanetary space must be filled with a medium through which the light waves from the planets and stars traveled. They called it aether, and the concept was not abandoned until the 20th century when it was discovered that light was susceptible to the gravitational attraction of large bodies, such as the sun. In contemporary science, photons are understood to have both wave-like and particle-like properties, and they do not need a medium through which to travel, which is why they can pass through a vacuum. Well, then, if it is true that all the main features of sacraments can be understood without resorting to the concept of a sacramental reality (sacramentum et res) that is administered and received (ex opere operato) when a sacramental ritual (sacramentum tantum) is performed, then it appears that we have hit upon a genuine alternative to the scholastic understanding of sacraments and how they work, which is woven into the traditional Catholic theology of sacraments and which is the theoretical basis for a number of canons. (For example, one cannot be baptized twice because, once one has "received the sacrament of baptism," one cannot receive it again by going through the ritual again.) I believe this is, as I just said, a genuine alternative and not another instance of a contemporary theology such as those that are summarized in chapter 5 of Doors to the Sacred. When Schillebeeckx and Rahner proposed their new theologies, they deliberately accounted for the essential elements of Catholic belief (e.g., the permanence of baptism), which is why their ideas were found to be acceptable by all but the most conservative members of the magisterium. The same could be said, more or less, about the other approaches mentioned in chapter 5 because all of them either regard the administration and reception of sacraments as something that needs to be explained in a Catholic sacramental theology, or they ignore this belief and don't try to explain it without realizing that by doing so, they are leaving out something central to traditional Catholic faith. It seems to me, however, that the time has come to question one of the elements of traditional sacramental theology, namely the sacramental reality that is supposed to be received through the performance of the rite, because it is becoming increasingly dysfunctional which is a fancy way of saying that it doesn't work any more; it doesn't explain what the concept was introduced to explain. The sacramental character of baptism is supposed to explain (among other things) why those who are baptized remain Christians for life. Although "once baptized, Christian forever" may have been true in the Middle Ages, it is certainly not true today when Catholics get rebaptized in Evangelical churches, when they become Muslims, or when they stop being religious altogether. The character was also supposed to explain differences between Christians and non-christians (such as the ability to love others in a self-sacrificing and Christ-like way), but today most 2

4 Catholics would agree that caritas or agape can be found in people of other religions, and even in altruistic atheists. The sacramental character of confirmation has always been problematic, today more than ever. In a word, what difference does confirmation make? Judging by how people behave before and after being confirmed, the answer seems to be: not much. The sacramental character of marriage is supposed to explain why Christian marriages are indissoluble. (As Schillebeeckx pointed out in his history of the sacrament and its theology, through the early 12th century it was understood that Christians should not divorce, but once the bond of marriage was thought to be a sacramental reality analogous to the indelible seal of baptism, it was understood that Christians could not divorce.) But today it is apparent that Christian marriages are quite dissolvable, although only Catholics are supposed to get former marriages annulled before remarrying. This is not a great problem for Catholics any more because about 90% of them do not bother to go through the annulment process before remarrying. But it presents a sometimes disconcerting pastoral problem when divorced and remarried Protestants want to join the Church, only to be told that they must obtain an annulment before they can receive communion! Not much needs to be said about the sacramental reality that is present when one "receives the sacrament of penance" or when one "receives the sacrament of extreme unction" (as we used to say) because, although scholastic theologians posited that such a reality must be received through the sacramental rite, they were never able to agree what it is in the case of these two sacraments. So the concept was dysfunctional even in scholastic sacramental theology! One could say that the sacramental character bestowed through ordination is still very evident in Catholic life because the Church makes a sharp distinction between lay ministries and clerical ministries, which are primarily sacramental functions. Yet even here the distinction is being blurred for many Catholics when lay people preside at worship, when deacons witness marriages, and when catechists preach and baptize (mainly in countries with a severe shortage of priests). And what of all those men who were made "priests forever, according to the order of Melchizedek," and who were later "laicized" without really becoming laymen again. Talk about legal fictions! (I won't even attempt to discuss how the theology of priestly powers is used to prevent women from being ordained.) Now, the sacramental reality involved in the eucharist is of quite a different order, so I will not talk about it here, except to say that it is possible to explain the real presence of Christ in the eucharist without resorting to that concept. OK, I think I have made a case for the concept of sacramental reality being rather dysfunctional. Now back to the piece that I wrote and the workshop on which it is based. As I indicated earlier, the workshop enables people to develop an understanding of sacraments that they can both comprehend (which is not true of all sacramental theologies!) and verify by reflecting on their own experience. If you have understood the piece that I sent you (which I certainly believe you have), and if you have found it to be true to your own experience of 3

5 symbols and ceremonies (which you probably have, if you did the personal reflections that you were invited to perform), then it seems to me that you face something of a dilemma, although you have not realized it yet. The dilemma can be put this way: The explanation of sacraments offered in this piece does not contradict Catholic teaching as presented, say, in the 1994 Catechism, but it is contrary to it. Logically, contraries are opposed in such a way that both cannot be true, although both may be false. The authors of the Catechism would be unwilling to accept the latter possibility. I believe that the explanation offered in this piece is verifiable; hence it can be proven to be true. It is not a matter of theological speculation. Since contraries cannot both be true, if this understanding of sacraments is true, then the accepted Catholic understanding of sacraments is not true. There may be a flaw in the above argument, but I have not been able to find it. This, then, is what I hope our discussion in Newport will be about. Put succinctly, if the argument is flawed, then I have a problem; but if the argument is not flawed, then the Catholic Church has a problem! Please come and help me think this through, but also feel free to write to me before then if you think you see something that would contribute to this conversation. Still trying to be both Catholic and critical, Joe 4