Originally published at crisis magazine
If you were asked to come up with a quick summary of the Church’s teaching on the sacraments, how long would it take you? Could you boil it all down into a single sentence? Yes, I think you could do it. Quite easily, actually. In fact, it was nicely done five centuries ago at the Council of Trent, the happy outcome of which has given us nine perfectly simple words: an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace.
Since then, however, it has given no little grief to heaps of people who, alas, do not share our persuasion. They are rightly called Protestants because, well, that’s pretty much what they do. At least from the time of Luther and Calvin, Cranmer and Knox, their whole outlook has been one of sheer uninterrupted protest. Against the idea, most especially, that this finite world can become not just the setting for but the point of mediation between ourselves and the infinite God. And, not infrequently, in accents both shrill and intolerant.
In other words, they became experts early on at the science of subtraction, which is the art of removing whatever gets in the way of their scrubbed down version of
