Why does the Roman Catholic Church have seven sacraments?

The sacraments, the sacramental journey, the sacramental life, etc., either taken together or separately, all characterize Roman Catholic theology and practice at the core level.

Entering the sacramental mystery and actions of the Roman Catholic Church means accessing it from the main door and finding oneself in the main room.

This is to say that the book by Romanus Cessario on the seven sacraments is an invitation to explore what lies at the heart of the Roman Catholic account of the gospel.

Cessario is well-positioned to give such a perspective: a leading scholar in Thomistic studies, himself a member of the Order of Preachers (Ordo Praedicatorum), he also holds the Adam Cardinal Maida Chair of Theology at Ava Maria University, Florida.

He is a systematic theologian with a particular interest in historical theology, mainly Thomism.

The book’s take is neither an exercise in creative theology nor an exploration of new directions in sacramental theology.

Rather, it is a thoughtful presentation of the magisterial tradition of the Roman Catholic Church on the sacraments, with particular attention given to Thomas Aquinas’s teaching and legacy, coupled with a commendation of it that, in the end, appears to take an apologetic tone.

In fact, the book ends with these words: “[T]he foregoing presentation of the pattern of sacramental life in the Catholic Church aims to encourage everyone to embrace these rhythms of salvation unto everlasting life” (p. 274).

The literary genre of the book could be described as catechetical, in the high sense of the word.

The volume is divided into two parts: the first one (made of twelve chapters) deals with Catholic sacramental theology in general, whereas the second one (made of seven chapters) expounds on each sacrament, classifying them as sacraments of initiation, sacraments of healing, and sacraments at the service of communion.

Given that Roman Catholic theology is sacramental at the core, Cessario helpfully argues that the Roman Catholic account of the gospel is that “God bestows his gifts of grace only through Christ and the visible mediations that Christ establishes and bequeaths to his Church” (p. 9).

Here we find a concise, yet admirably clear, summary of the two axioms of Roman Catholicism. On the one hand, the “nature-grace interdependence” whereby God’s gifts of grace reach out to us only through visible forms provided by nature.

On the other, the “Christ-Church interconnection” whereby Christ continues his work through the mediations of the Church.

The sacraments display both the necessity of natural objects (e.g. water, oil, bread, wine) to receive grace (Cessario here quotes Thomas approvingly when he writes about “the power inherent in the materials to act as signs and convey meaning,” p. 99) and the necessity of the Church through its priests who act as an alter Christus (i.e. another Christ) in administering it.

In a nutshell, there is a whole theological world in this sentence. Evangelical readers should pause for a moment here.

The Roman Catholic account of the sacraments is not to be taken sacrament by sacrament, as if they were disconnected actions, but as a whole, since they are part of a sacramental vision grounded on the deepest commitments of Roman Catholicism that, at the core level, reject the “Scripture alone” and “faith alone” principles of the biblical gospel. 

Cessario is well aware that when dealing sacramental theology today, one needs to wrestle with the legacy of Vatican II (1962-1965), the latest Council of the Roman Catholic Church that included a dedicated document on liturgy, i.e. Sacrosanctum Concilium, and the innovations that followed.

Cessario readily acknowledges that in the aftermath of Vatican II, the attention of theologians moved “away from the classic themes in Catholic sacramental theology” (p. 17).

As a result, topics like the objective efficacy of the sacraments and the nature of sacramental grace, pillars of traditional Roman sacramentology, were approached differently. Their interpretation no longer appealed to ontological categories but “relied on the modern notion of encounter” (p. 25).

Representative of this trend is Edward Schillebeeckx’s book Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (1963), where the more existentialist notion of encounter replaced the metaphysical framework of sacramental causality, efficacy, and mediation embraced by the Roman Church in its official teaching.

The Council’s call to liturgical renewal was understood and pursued in terms of discontinuity with traditional patterns of thought and practice, causing some sacramental confusion.

The long-term, negative effects of these post-conciliar debates are the concerns that form the background of Cessario’s book. Here the Thomist theologian wants to provide a theological account of the sacraments embedded in traditional Roman Catholic understanding and present it to counter deviating trends in contemporary sacramental practices.

Less present in this part of the book is the awareness of the widespread abandonment of sacramental practice in much of Europe and, in general, the West, especially in the younger generations.

In these regions, most Catholics do not receive the sacraments of reconciliation and the Eucharist on an ongoing basis, creating a worrying gap between the “hard” sacramental structure of the Roman Church that is so characteristic of its traditional outlook and the “light” participation of the faithful in its operations.

Cessario seems more concerned with the post-Vatican II deviations from the traditional sacramental patterns than with the recent decline in sacramental practice.

In line with the standard Roman Catholic view of “tradition” – that is recalled by quoting Dei Verbum 10: “[S]acred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and the Magisterium of the Church are so connected and associated that one of them cannot stand without the others” (p. 12) – Cessario’s authoritative reference points are Thomas Aquinas, the Council of Trent, Vatican II as it is read by the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the recent papal magisterium of John Paul II.

These voices form the ecclesiastical tradition that Cessario puts himself in the service of and wants to commend in facing the worrying ripple effects of some post-Vatican II ambiguous re-interpretations of Roman Catholic sacramentology.

After setting the stage for what lies ahead, the departure point is to retrieve the notion of sacramental causality. Central to Rome’s view is that “the sacraments confer the grace they signify,” as the Catechism no. 1127 states.

Here Cessario summarizes Thomas’s view of efficient causality as the hinge of sacramental theology. His arguments revolve around the necessity of ontological and causative structures threatened by existential, encounter-type categories.

While his interpretation of Thomas seems impeccable, there is no attempt to ground the whole discourse in Scripture. The starting point here is a philosophical notion of causality derived from Medieval thought rather than a theology of “sign” stemming from the Bible.

This epistemic pattern appears consistently in Cessario’s work. His book is based “on the principles of classical Thomism” (p. 79), and it reflects the nature of Roman Catholic theology of the sacraments, which heavily relies on Thomistic philosophical notions rather than biblical principles.

Again, it is not Scripture that has priority, but what defined his approach is one tradition within Roman Catholic theology.

The reliance on Thomas is apparent even when expounding how the sacraments cause God’s grace. When the sacramental action occurs, “a perfective physical causality” (p. 81) is at work in the sacraments.

What is implied here is that grace heals a wounded nature, perfecting it in the supernatural order.

The background, which is congruent with the “nature-grace interdependence,” is that sin is considered a “wound” to be healed, and the sacraments are those causative actions of grace that perform the healing.

At this point, Cessario introduces the tripartite structure of the sacraments:

1. Sacramentum tantum (the immediate grace produced by the sacrament); 2. Res et sacramentum (the abiding effect of the sacrament); 3. Res tantum (just the reality or the reality only), and he carefully explains the complex account of these medieval philosophical descriptors.

The underlying point is to stress the causalitatis physicae perfectivae (the perfective physical causality), another instance that the sacramental theology of Rome requires more philosophical preliminaries than plain biblical support.

As a matter of fact, “Catholic theology conceives of sacramental instrumentality after Aristotle’s notion of principal and secondary causes” (p. 118).

Outside of this philosophical perimeter, as it is re-interpreted by the Thomistic tradition, it is hard to find what constitutes the plausibility structures of Rome’s sacramental theology.

The causality principle makes the sacraments work both as “image-perfection” (elevating nature) and as “image-restoration” (healing nature), another insight taken from Thomas (p. 132).

According to Cessario, the stress on causality should not lead to developing a magical view of how the sacraments work as if they were a combination of words and actions governed by an impersonal supernatural power. 

On the contrary, sacraments in general do not perform magic (p. 158) and, more specifically, “baptism is not magic” (pp. 174-175). What happens in the sacraments is a “mysterious alchemy” (p. 175) between God’s efficacious work through physical realities and man’s fragile freedom and assent.

As to the nature of the sacrament, the Dominican theologian refers to the “Christ-Church interconnection” in establishing a parallel between the constitution of the sacrament and the incarnation of Christ whereby the Word of God took on flesh in the womb of the virgin Mary.

The sensible and perceptible reality of the sacraments stemming from the “nature-grace interdependence” is associated with them being intertwined with the incarnation.

Quoting David Bourke, Cessario asserts that “as prolongations and extensions of the incarnate Word it is fitting that the sacraments should correspond in structure to it and consist of both words and fleshly realities” (p. 101).

Later he argues, this time quoting John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio (1999), that the sacraments follow “the logic of the Incarnation” (p. 170).

This confirms that the Roman Catholic sacramentology makes sense within the context of the two axioms and as an elaboration of Thomistic categories of thought.

In a book seeking to commend traditional patterns of thought, it is no surprise to find the rehearsal of Aquinas’s well-established assumption that it was Christ himself who instituted each of the seven sacraments, even though to prove the point, one has to work out several inferences rather than looking for Scriptural support.

If one reads the Bible for what it says, it is apparent that some sacraments, e.g. confirmation and anointing of the sick, were not instituted by our Lord.

Only if, and when, the Roman Catholic account of the “Christ-Church interconnection” is taken for granted and assumed can one ascribe to Christ what was decided by the Church.

Even regarding the number of the sacraments, Cessario is dogmatic. In line with the Council of Trent, there are seven and “no other option is possible” (p. 131), although the only argument given for it is that of “suitableness or fittingness” (p. 133) concerning the perfection of the human person, i.e. an anthropological criterion but hardly a biblically grounded reason.

As already indicated, the book’s second part is a lengthy presentation of the seven sacraments: baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, penance and reconciliation, anointing of the sick, holy orders, and matrimony, always stressing the “objective efficacy” (p. 150) of their administration.

Overall, Cessario gives much attention to the detailed deliberations of the Council of Trent, both in terms of its decrees and canons.

In line with the purposes of the book, the treatment given to each sacrament reflects the Roman Catholic position as it is enshrined at Trent and its implementation.

As for baptism, it is interesting to read of its necessity for salvation and also, as the Catechism teaches (no. 1257), the fact that “God has bound salvation to the sacrament of Baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments” (p. 155).

The recognition of the divine will explains why Roman Catholicism is tied to its sacramental structure (teaching the causative efficacy of the sacraments to receive salvation) and is, at the same, committed to the hope for the salvation of all, regardless of faith in Christ and the administration of the sacraments, especially baptism.

The Roman Catholic view of baptism is also intertwined with its doctrine of justification. Cessario acknowledges the controversy over the doctrine during the Protestant Reformation and reaffirms the Catholic view established at Trent. 

Regarding confirmation, Cessario argues that “the Catholic Church expects the confirmed Christian to take seriously his or her obligation to act as a true witness of Christ” (p. 180).

Again, the fact that this expectation is increasingly frustrated by the high rates of sacramental abandonment after confirmation does not seem to be a point that Cessario feels the need to ask serious questions about regarding the sacramental structure and its “causative” dimension.

If baptism causes people to have their original sin removed and be justified, why is it that after their teenage years, many Catholics stop going to church and, therefore, somehow interrupt the sacramental journey?

Cessario wants to reaffirm the traditional teaching on confirmation from the Council of Florence to the Council of Trent but does not seem as concerned as with the pastoral issues it involves.

His theological endeavor is focused on ecclesiastical texts in an attempt to re-establish the authentic teaching of the Roman Church more than actual people on the ground who seem to be going in different directions than those expected in the magisterial texts.

More fundamentally, isn’t the fact that the sacraments do not “cause” in and of themselves the expected outcomes an indication that the causative structure in Roman Catholic sacramentology is more of a philosophical grid than a biblically realistic category?

On the Eucharist, Cessario takes for granted that the eucharistic reading of John 6 (e.g. by the Catholic exegete Raymond Brown) is right and connects it to some early sacrificial interpretations of the Eucharist in the Church Fathers that were eventually elevated to a dogmatic status by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and confirmed by Trent.

In this context, he devotes a few pages to some Renaissance challenges that paved the way for the Reformation. While acknowledging the differences between Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, his general remark against them all is that they departed from “the clear teaching” of the Fourth Lateran Council (p. 204), considering it just “an opinion” (p. 205).

Their fault is mainly considered a breach of traditional medieval teaching. However, little effort is made to understand the biblical reasoning behind the sacramental theologies of the Reformers and their criticism of previous accounts of the sacraments.

As already noticed, Cessario operates within a theological framework governed by a particular tradition rather than being subject to the final authority of Scripture.

On Holy Orders, the “Christ-Church interconnection” is again clearly displayed as another demonstration of the pervasiveness of the axiom in shaping sacramental theology.

Quoting John Paul II, Cessario concurs that “in every priest it is Christ himself who comes” (p. 247) and “The priest is another Christ” (ibid.). It isn’t easy to find clearer statements than these.

In the Introduction, the author writes that “the book aims to present, without apology, the seven sacraments from a Catholic point of view” (p. 3). Having gone through the entire volume, one can say that Cessario has succeeded in his goal.

The book opens the door to the sacramental world of the Roman Catholic Church, and it does so with a catechetical and apologetic tone.

The book is particularly interesting for the evangelical reviewer because it frames Roman Catholic sacramentology within the two axioms of “nature-grace interdependence” and “Christ-Church interconnection” and with a heavy reliance on Thomistic categories.

In so doing, it exemplifies what it means for Roman Catholic theology and practice to be a well-integrated system and reflects the central role of Thomas Aquinas and his legacy in shaping it.

Leonardo De Chirico, theologian and evangelical pastor in Rome.