Signs of New Life: Homilies on the Church's Sacraments

By Joseph Ratzinger

At life’s many crossroads, the sacraments of the Church—Baptism, Confirmation, Confession, Holy Eucharist, Matrimony, Holy Orders, and Anointing of the Sick—bring people into contact with the saving work of God. In this collection of homilies, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) explains these celebrations of the Church and shows how they always offer an opportunity to announce our faith in Christ and to deepen our understanding of it. 

Ratzinger endeavored as a theologian to develop an understanding of the sacraments that would help to make participation in them, and in the Paschal Mystery, more fruitful. Many of these homilies connect the sacraments with a profound interpretation of Scripture. The scriptural passages interpreted in each homily are listed at the beginning of the chapter, so that this volume can also be used for scriptural meditation.

Since the Church herself is both a sacrament—that is, a sign of God’s saving action in the world—and the place where the sacraments take place, two of the chapters are about the Church, the body of believers where God dwells.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: May 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642291162

Joseph Ratzinger

Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) is widely recognized as one of the most brilliant theologians and spiritual leaders of our age. As pope he authored the best-selling Jesus of Nazareth; and prior to his pontificat

Book preview

SIGNS OF NEW LIFE

JOSEPH RATZINGER

BENEDICT XVI

Signs of New Life

type ornament

Homilies on the

Church’s Sacraments

With an Introduction by

BISHOP STEFAN OSTER, S.D.B

Selected and edited by

MANUEL SCHLÖGL

Translated by Michael J. Miller

IGNATIUS PRESS    SAN FRANCISCO

Original German edition:

Zeichen des neuen Lebens:

Predigten zu den Sakramenten der Kirche

© 2017 by Johannes Verlag Einsiedeln, Freiburg im Breisgau

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition) copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. All rights reserved worldwide.

Art and cover design TK

©2020 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-62164-297-8 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-64229-116-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number 2019952980

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Foreword by the Editor

Introduction

What Holds It All Together— Church as Foundation of Faith

BAPTISM

The Light of Life

Our Yes to Christ

CONFIRMATION

Choose Life!

Sealed with the Spirit

CONFESSION

Be Reconciled with God

He Restores to Us Our Dignity as His Children

HOLY EUCHARIST

Transformation Occurs in Prayer

In Bread and Wine He Gives Himself Entirely

ANOINTING OF THE SICK

Living by God’s Great Love

Abandoning Oneself to God’s Mercy

MATRIMONY

Maturing in Love

To Love Means to Give Oneself

HOLY ORDERS

Follow—Leave—Proclaim

I No Longer Call You Servants, but Friends

To Stay United with Jesus— Church as Communion around the Altar

Sources

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Preview and Excerpt from Western Culture Today and Tomorrow (Pope Benedict XVI)

Notes

Foreword by the Editor

The celebration of the Church’s sacraments, even in our secular age (Charles Taylor), is still an occasion on which many people encounter God’s saving work. Now as before there is a demand for Baptisms and weddings, First Communion and Confirmation; confession is experiencing a renaissance in many places; the Anointing of the Sick is often received with relatives and friends in attendance. Wherever sacraments are celebrated, they are also an opportunity to proclaim and deepen the faith.

Someone who preaches when the sacraments are administered must not only have experience in dealing with the word of God and with the historical-critical and spiritual exegesis of Scripture, but also have the ability to interpret the signs and symbolic actions, the rites and gestures in which God’s invisible grace becomes visible and efficacious.

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI endeavored as a theologian to develop the hermeneutics of the sacraments in a new way and to make fruitful the participation of others in the celebration of them. Last but not least, many of his homilies refer to individual sacraments and connect them with a profound interpretation of Scripture and of the Christ event.

For this volume, two texts were selected from his homiletic work for each of the seven sacraments; the selections illuminate different aspects of the sacramental event and thus complement one another. The fourteen homilies are framed by two texts on the topic Church, since all the sacraments are celebrated in the Church and there make visible their commission to be sign and instrument [of] union with God (Lumen gentium 1). The scriptural passages interpreted in each homily are listed at the beginning, so that the volume can also be used for scriptural meditation and spiritual reading.

My thanks, first of all, to the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, who reviewed once again the previously unpublished texts and with his characteristic generosity agreed to their publication; to the private secretary of His Holiness, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, for his kind assistance; to my diocesan ordinary, Bishop Stefan Oster, S.D.B., for his substantial introduction; and last but not least to the publishing house Johannes Verlag for suggesting this book and for their usual helpful collaboration.

I dedicate this volume of homilies to the Bishop Emeritus of Passau, Wilhelm Schraml. Through priestly ordination, he called me to the special sacramental ministry, and as bishop he celebrated and proclaimed the Church’s sacraments as what they are: signs of new life in Christ.

Passau, on the Solemnity of the

Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 2017

Rev. Dr. Manuel Schlögl

Introduction

Salvation history in the fragments

The whole in the fragment is the title of a famous book by the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, who develops in it various aspects of the theology of history, as the subtitle says.¹ In little things, in the fragmentary, in the concrete event within passing time, it is possible to get in contact with the whole, with the meaning of history, which is revealed to us in faith as salvation history. But this contact is possible only in such a way that we could never survey the meaning of the whole from our perspective, much less manipulate it to make it our own history. We can, however, get involved in it here and now by simply being there, present concretely in the flesh, listening to God’s word, and obediently setting out on the way in front of us: accepting the gifts that are given to us and the tasks that are assigned to us. And so we become participants, partners, pilgrims on the way in God’s great plan for his history—toward the salvation that he prepared for his people and each individual person. Insofar as we allow our individual story to be enfolded in God’s ways with his people, the whole will shine forth, too, in each individual story of faith: the fact that God is present through his faithful ones and leads them together in history as a whole toward perfection. And it will dawn on us that man first finds his real freedom and wins it permanently by being rooted in this way.

Are there nodal points in life?

But are there such things as decisive nodal points, in which man’s contact with the eternal shines forth more clearly than in average everyday life, work, and leisure? From time immemorial, such very significant nodal points have included the beginning and the end of life, the transition from childhood to adult life, the mutual discovery and union of lovers, and also the transformation of life through a deeper insight into its real meaning. Man’s profound awareness that he is more than a mere product of nature, more than an accidental being that arrives in the biological stream of life and disappears again, was expressed in the myths and religious rites of the nations, so that these nodal points were fraught with significance that towers over the individual person himself. Man already is always greater than his individual existence; he is most profoundly a communal being and always goes beyond himself into his community. But he also goes beyond himself into what was thought or believed to be heaven or the realm of the dead.

Christ gives the decisive explanation and direction

Now Christians believe that this original human belief in an origin and inkling of a destination that surpasses this life are decisively explained and directed in the coming of Jesus Christ. God himself arrives, becomes a man, and thus shows in an unsurpassable way who man is and who he can really be. Even more: Christ comes from the Father and goes back to the Father, but he wants us, his human brothers and sisters, to become once again children of the Father and to be reconciled with him. God is originally the Father of all mankind, but fallen humanity has gone astray and no longer knows about this original status as children. Man lives in the state of alienation, sin, egocentrism, fear of disappearing in death. Christ is in the most profound sense possible first of all the only Son of the Father. But he wants to be united with mankind as our brother in such a way that the Father can again see his only begotten Son in his creatures and rejoice in him. Christ enters into his creation permanently as a man—and even as the glorified Christ, he still remains a man.

Revaluation of the bodily condition

Hence, through the fact that he becomes man—and consequently is made flesh—all matter, too, everything material, experiences a profound affirmation. Whereas the mythical, philosophical, or religious experience of mankind that preceded Christ all too often was determined by the belief that matter and consequently the human bodily condition could be an obstacle for the spirit as it strove to lift itself up to the heights of the divine, this faith changes radically with Christ. Now, in him and henceforth in all who belong to him, he reveals that the human body itself is an expression of the spirit; the body is interpreted and experienced as a temple of God (see 1 Cor 6:19), because Christ himself sanctified the temple of his body (Jn 2:21).

To the close of the age

Therefore, the aforementioned historical nodal points of a human life—birth and death, loving union and transition to adulthood—can become specially sanctified moments through an interior union with the Lord and an external material sign. Christ walks with us through history—to the close of the age (Mt 28:20)—and at the prominent points of our life, his brothers and sisters can rely in faith on this presence with a special concentration: sacramentally. In Baptism and the Anointing of the Sick, in Confirmation and Matrimony, in the conversion of Penance.

The meal and the Eucharist

Christ radically pervades the material world: this is fully disclosed in two additional sacraments. In the Eucharist, the Lord uses a human meal, and thus also the everyday process of eating, in which man incorporates the material world into himself in a very fundamental sense and is nourished by it. The human meal, however, was always more than merely eating; a meal always established fellowship, also, participation in another’s life, life as receiving the fruits of the earth, which are thus lifted up into man’s cultural life form.

Jesus gives himself now as food. He uses bread and wine so as to transform himself into them and thus to help man to be transformed again and again. The concrete history of the individual’s walk with Christ finds in the Eucharistic meal again and again its most substantial encounter and form of spiritualization. So much so that it reverses the process of assimilation in eating: The person who eats bread transforms the bread into food that builds up the human body. The person who receives the Bread of Life, however, is transformed by Christ into someone who builds up his body, the Body of Christ, the Church.

Fully taken in possession

In ordination to the ministry of the deacon, priest, and bishop, finally, we believe that through the imposition of hands on the candidate for ordination Christ himself explicitly takes possession of him. Christ defines him explicitly and publicly as someone who can act in his name; someone who will make Christ present especially in preaching, in the Eucharist, and in forgiving sins. The individual man is called to renounce and to leave many things behind for Christ’s sake. And he will be sent back a changed man, marked with the seal of the priest—and thus with the commission to give something that he himself does not have on his own: the Lord’s presence in the Blessed Sacrament.

The Church herself is a sacrament

All sacraments, but particularly the Eucharist, are so central to our faith, our tradition, our Church, that the Second Vatican Council said that the Church as a whole is a sacrament, namely, "a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human