Living the Catechism of the Catholic Church: A Brief Commentary on the Catechism for Every Week of the Year: The Sacraments

By Christoph Schoenborn

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the editor of the monumental Catechism of the Catholic Church, a worldwide best seller, provides a brief and profound commentary on the second part of the Catechism, the sacraments. Schönborn gives an incisive, detailed analysis of the sacraments, providing a specific meditation for each week of the year on how to better live the Catholic faith with the aid of the sacraments and the Mass, and explained in the Catechism. Through these 52 meditations, Schönborn's hope is for the reader to not just have a better grasp of the Catholic doctrine and belief, but especially to grow in a greater love of and devotion to the person of Jesus Christ.

"Faith is a whole. It has only one heart, one center, Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God. Christ must therefore also be the center of catechesis whose object is 'putting people...in communion...with Jesus Christ; only He can lead us to the love of the Father in the Spirit".
-Cardinal Christoph Schönborn

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781681493046

Christoph Schoenborn

Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, is a renowned spiritual teacher and writer. He was a student of Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) and with him was co-editor of the monumental Catechism of the Catholic Church. He has authored numerous books including Jesus, the Divine Physician, Chance or Purpose?, Behold, God's Son, and Living the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

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Foreword

Power came forth from him and healed them all. That is how Saint Luke the Evangelist describes the effect of Jesus on the many people who tried to touch him (Lk 6:19; 5:17; 8:45-47). What happened then to men in Galilee takes place today whenever men are touched by the sacraments of Christ. For, as the Catechism says, the sacraments are powers that come forth from the Body of Christ, which is ever-living and life-giving (Catechism of the Catholic Church [hereafter CCC] 1116).

It is with these healing and helping powers, with the sevenfold wellspring of the sacraments, that the following fifty-two short chapters are concerned. As in the first volume [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995], I have gathered together the weekly commentaries on the Catechism that I published in Vienna’s archdiocesan newspaper, this time on the Catechism’s second part, The Celebration of the Christian Mystery.

May this little book help to make the sacraments better known and lived as the masterworks of God in the new and everlasting covenant (CCC 1116).

+ Christoph Schönborn

Archbishop of Vienna

Feast of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux

October 1, 1996

1

What is liturgy?

In Austria, at the present time, Adolf Holl recently remarked, about 1.3 million Catholics go to church every Sunday. This means that Holy Mass is the most popular of all our public activities (cinema, soccer, theatre, and so on). There used to be more people in church. There may be fewer in years to come. But one thing remains the same throughout the centuries: the faithful come together Sunday by Sunday, many also day by day, for the worship of God, for the celebration of the liturgy. The pagans of antiquity recognized this as the special mark of the Christians. In a letter written about A.D. 112, Pliny told the Emperor Trajan that, on a certain day before daybreak, a large number of Christians came together in order to sing antiphonally a hymn to Christ as to a god. From the beginning, the Church has been a community that prays and celebrates divine worship.

The Greek word for liturgy (leiturgia) primarily means the performing of a service for the community (cf. 2 Cor 9:12), but it can also mean divine worship in public (cf. Acts 13:2). As Christians understand it, the liturgy is first of all the work of God for men before it becomes our response of thanksgiving and supplication in divine worship. It is not in the first place we who fashion the liturgy. No, it is Christ who is the liturgist, the principal celebrant of our divine worship. He has accomplished the work of God for us: our redemption and the glorification of God (CCC 1067). The great liturgy of Christ is the surrender of his life, the sacrifice he offered the Father on the Cross once and for all (CCC 1085), for us and for our reconciliation.

Every time the risen Lord celebrates the liturgy for us and with us, the work of our redemption is accomplished (CCC 1068). This is above all true of the Eucharist, in which Christ offers himself, together with his Body the Church, to God the Father.

Of course, the liturgy is not the Church’s only activity (CCC 1072). The preaching of the Gospel and the service of neighbor by active love, personal prayer and sacrifice, the witness of Christian life, whether quiet or conspicuous: all these things are indispensable parts of the Church’s life. However, the liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed (CCC 1074). The Rule of Saint Benedict says that nothing should take precedence over divine worship (CCC 347), though, of course, sometimes it is necessary, for the urgent needs of our neighbor, to forego attendance at divine worship.

Love of neighbor and the worship of God are not opposed. On the contrary for the Church, the liturgy is the font from which all her power flows (CCC 1074). That is why it deserves the greatest care and reverence. Experience proves that wherever the Church’s liturgy is celebrated in its simple beauty with dignity and love, the faithful come together. The liturgy is like a fountain in which the living wellspring that is Christ is contained and given to us to drink.

2

God the Father:

source and origin of the whole liturgy

Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change (Jas 1:17).

The liturgy is first and foremost, as we have seen, the work of God for men. Our divine worship will always be a response to God’s gifts. That is why there is always a two-way movement in everything that happens in the liturgy: a descending movement and an ascending movement, the first coming from the eternal Father, the source and origin of all life, and the second returning to him in petition, thanks, and praise. Hebrew, the original language of the Bible, has one and the same word for these two movements. The word barak, bera’ha, means both God’s blessing and our blessing, our praising of God in response. In Latin, in the words benedicere and benedictio, and in some modern languages, we discover this same double movement (CCC 1078).

Both meanings of blessing are expressed in the call of Abraham. God says to Abraham: I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you . . . and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves (Gen 12:2-3). The man blessed by God becomes a blessing himself. Through his life and prayer he gives back to God his blessing by way of gratitude.

The Old Testament gives us many examples of such responsive blessings. They provide prototypes of the Christian liturgy. For example, when Moses tells his father-in-law how God has set his people free from slavery in Egypt and miraculously delivered them out of the hand of Pharaoh, Jethro rejoices and says: Blessed be the Lord, who has delivered you out of the hands of the Egyptians and out of the hand of Pharaoh. Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods. Then Jethro offered to God’s glory a burnt offering and sacrifices, and Aaron came with all the elders of Israel to eat bread with Moses’ father-in-law before God (Ex 18:8-12).

Here we find already foreshadowed all the essential elements of the Christian liturgy: the Liturgy of the Word calls to mind all the marvelous deeds of God; the Preface praises God for all his blessings; the sacrifice embodies thanks and supplication; the celebration ends with the meal, the sign of the presence of God’s blessing. What is new about Christian liturgy is Christ himself. He is God’s blessing, the Father’s perfect gift, and for him we bless God in the liturgy’s song of praise. He is the gift at once of sacrifice and meal: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places (Eph 1:3; CCC 1077).

In the liturgy of the Church, God the Father is blessed and adored as the source of all the blessings of creation and salvation with which he has blessed us in his Son, in order to give us the Spirit of filial adoption (CCC 1110).

3

The work of Christ in the liturgy

What do we celebrate in the liturgy? We proclaim your death, O Lord, and we confess your resurrection until you come. Christ is the center of the liturgy. At Christmas we celebrate his birth, at Easter his Passion and Resurrection. We celebrate his Baptism and his Transfiguration, his forty days in the wilderness and his Ascension into Heaven. But celebrating here does not mean merely recalling. It has the significance of a now: in the Eucharist Christ’s death and Resurrection are present; he himself is there. This is what is unique about Christian liturgy: it is Christ’s work. In what sense?

But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son (Gal 4:4). The work of God is the sending of his Son. It reveals the mystery which was kept secret for long ages (Rom 16:25). It opens up the mystery of love that is God himself (1 Jn 4:16), the eternal communion of the Father,