None of which is to say that reason, or rationality, does not contribute to a believer’s understanding of the sacraments, or every other aspect of reality, for it is a tenet of Christianity that reason is a gift, and that it should be employed in every endeavor, no matter the subject, as the vanguard or guiding tendency of mind, until it can be extended no further, and exhausts itself at the limits of its relevancy, at which point the principles of faith, under the auspices of our imagination, and in concert with what has been conveyed to us through scripture and tradition (which can include, on rare occasions, mystical experience), will involve themselves in the filling out of whatever territory of unknowing is present to us.
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For proof is antithetical to faith, and faith is important in the person who would dispose themselves to a sacrament. Though it is also true, according to the faith, that the power of the sacraments is such that their efficacy does not depend on anything but the movement of providence, if such is the will of providence. As is evidenced in Baptism, wherein an infant, in their lack of cognizance, can undergo the sacrament, and is said to be the beneficiary of its graces, by way of the volition and assent of their godparents alone. And in Anointing of the Sick (sometimes referred to as Last Rites), wherein illness or injury might preclude a person from an awareness of their condition and their surroundings.
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Which isn’t to place the burden of proof, for the alleged baselessness of the sacraments, on the agnostic, or unbeliever, but only to say that, to the extent that the believer can dwell in their belief, and not be engaged, at every given moment, in the work of evangelism, neither is the burden of proof for the reality of the sacraments on them. Though of course that reality, if indeed there is one, is so embedded in the spiritual realm that the very idea that it could be ‘proven’ is a non-starter, of which even an evangelist is aware, and has no intention of denying.
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In other words, if one wants to argue that there is no reason for the Church existentially, and that the world has no need of her except, perhaps, insofar as she coincides with the goals of humanism (as a vehicle for social justice, for example, or in her care for the poor), one will want to address oneself to her sacraments, and show that they are illusory, or in vain (assuming that one is willing to grant, or put aside for a moment, the more fundamental claims relating to the divinity of Jesus).
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The importance of which sacraments, to a person who believes in their efficacy (and in the instituting of them by Christ, during the years of his ministry), I think is sometimes forgotten, misunderstood, or deemed to be absurd, by those who would regard organized religion in general, and the Catholic faith in particular, as a trifling thing, unnecessary at best.
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Which isn’t to say that the Church herself, comprised as she is of members, should not aim always for virtue, but only that there is, in her pastoral nature, an understanding that sin is an inevitability to which she offers herself as a remedy, and that the most immediate source of sanctifying grace, outside of individual prayer, and the trials that are particular to any given life, is to be found in her sacraments, the dispensation of which is unique to Catholicism, though they can also be found, with varying degrees of emphasis and completeness, in other denominations of Christianity.
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And, anyway, ‘authority’ is not quite the right word, insofar as it doesn’t easily detach from its worldly connotations. For this authority that I refer to doesn’t ‘belong’ to the Church, in any meaningful sense of the word, and neither can any of the Church’s members be said to merit it, no matter how virtuous they might be, but rather it arrives gratuitously, and not necessarily exclusively, to certain channels or ‘offices’ within the Church, by way of her relationship to Christ, who in turn receives it from the Father, with whom, as he says, he is ‘one.’
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Which I do not mean as a slight against Peter, who I imagine was, by the end of his life, a giant of virtue, relative to most of us, but only to make clear how the authority of the Church (in the view of those who would recognize her authority), does not depend on, and cannot be measured by, the righteousness of her members in specific instances.
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If one would like evidence of the Church’s awareness of this fact, look no further than the man who, in the Church’s understanding, Christ invested with the powers of the office that would come to be known as the ‘papacy.’ For the confidence of such an action, to anyone who is familiar with the weaknesses of Saint Peter, as they are revealed in the Gospels, is so astonishing that it is comprehensible only when viewed through a prism of divine logic.
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Of which I’ll say nothing, except that it is relevant only in certain instances of dogma, and has absolutely no relation to the character of any particular pope.
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From which promise is drawn, among other consequences of theology, the oft-misunderstood notion of ‘papal infallibility.’
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Which calls to my mind the promise that Christ uttered to Peter, in whom the apostolic succession of the Church finds its origin: “I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
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Meaning that Our Lady, in her wisdom, not only provided Bernadette with an answer, in that particular instance, but affirmed the metaphysical reality of the Church, as it progresses through time, in history.
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Whereby, I think, an additional beauty is revealed. In that the Blessed Virgin Mary, who in the life of the Church is very much like a mother, is so invested in the destiny of the Church, and in its reality as a mystical body, that she could affirm, with the utterance of a phrase, not only the integrity of Bernadette’s claims, in the instance of those apparitions, but also, by using words from the Church’s own promulgation, as they had appeared in a papal decree, not many years earlier, the very dogma that the Church had adopted with regard to her, so as to ally herself, nominally as well as essentially, with its explication of her.
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For while the phrase “I am the Immaculate Conception” is an answer to Bernadette’s question, it is also, by its formulation, a way of speaking to those in a position of authority who had doubted the girl, and who, to test her, had insisted that she ‘find out’ the lady’s name, and report it to them, before they would even begin to consider her requests, which were not, after all, anything immoderate, or out of keeping with the Church’s mission in the world, but were, in the evangelical and penitential sense, what one might expect to hear, in general if not specifically.
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Which is important to recognize, I think, for how it reveals the beauty with which the divine is willing to condescend to us, and to meet us sometimes on our own terms, with love and without irritation, though with, perhaps, a sort of motherly resignation, as if it knows what is good for us and what merely will indulge us, and always with an astonishing ability to invigorate, by way of its replies to our mulish insistence on ‘proof,’ a duality of function, wherein the practical answers to our pedestrian questions also contribute to the miraculousness of the event.
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For the purport of her message and her visitation, in addition to whatever it meant for Bernadette personally, as a soul of such blessedness that it was chosen for a communication from Our Lady, was a request for prayer and penance, the forming of a procession leading to the grotto, and the building of a chapel on the site where water had bubbled up into a spring. And not, in other words, the revealing of her own identity, even though it is true that the person of Our Lady is inextricable from the meaning of this event.
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For it was not immediately that the ‘young lady’ revealed her identity to Bernadette, and even then, it seems (if you read the accounts), not without a touch of demurral, or amused reluctance, suggestive of the fact that we, as humans, continually miss the point of our own existence, as it must appear in the scheme of divine wisdom.
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Which I mention now, in the context of Bernadette Soubirous (the ‘little shepherdess of Lourdes,’ as she came to be known) for how unfamiliar that theological designation would have been to her, in relation to the proportion of her learning, and the simplicity of her mind, even as that very designation was uttered to her, by Our Lady, toward the last of the apparitions.
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As a point of theology, it has not been without controversy, and was adopted as a teaching of the Catholic Church only in 1854.