Tag Archives: Council of Trent

What is Actual Grace?

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Our Lord told the Apostles that they were given the power to understand the mysteries of God’s Kingdom.  For the rest of the people, He relied on the power of parables to teach them about these same mysteries.  To explain one of the most central mysteries of our Faith, grace, Our Lord repeatedly relied on the image of a seed.  Just as there is a hidden cooperation between soil and seed, there is a mysterious cooperation between human freedom and Divine power. 

While this action remains in the realm of theological mystery, this does not mean that we need to remain fully ignorant or passive to how grace works on and in us.  If that was true, then Our Lord would not have bothered using natural things to describe these supernatural realities.  Understanding the “mechanics” of grace turns out to be vital (in the truest sense of the word) to our sanctification and personal redemption. 

Shedding Light on the Mystery

The problem is that most of us labor under a vague understanding of grace as a concept.  As the Latin term gratis implies it involves a gift given freely.  But we must take the term also in the sense of being pleasing to someone—as in “I am in his good graces.”  Fully understood then grace is a free gift that makes us truly pleasing to God.  This bestowing of “pleasing-ness” happens in two ways that have been traditionally categorized as Actual Grace and Sanctifying Grace. 

Just as in the natural life, God must both bestow existence and continue to sustain that existence, it is also in the supernatural life.  God bestows supernatural life through Sanctifying Grace and continues that life through the power of Actual Grace.  This distinction is clearly laid out in Chapter 3 of the Book of Revelation when Our Lord says: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with Me” (Rev 3:20).  Our Lord’s knocking and our opening is the action of Actual Grace while the dining together that is the sign of a shared life is Sanctifying Grace.  In order to be brief, we will limit our discussion to Actual Grace here and will cover Sanctifying Grace another time. 

“Without Me You Can Do Nothing”

Men and women, even in their fallen state, are still capable of morally good actions naturally.  What they are not capable of are supernaturally good (i.e. meritorious) actions.  For this, they must both have supernatural life (Sanctifying Grace) and the sustained supernatural power that we call Actual Grace.  When Our Lord says “without Me you can do nothing” He is primarily referring to the supernaturally good actions we are moved to do by actual grace.

As an aside, some of the Doctors of Prayer in the Church say that at a certain point actual graces are no longer needed in the person in the Unitive Way because the Gifts of the Holy Spirit are fully operative.  This makes sense, but because all of us must journey through the Purgative and Illuminative Way first, we can assume that every supernatural act that we perform must first be motivated by actual grace.

By “nothing” then Our Lord means “nothing that will last for eternity”.  This includes not just our supernaturally good actions, but conversion itself.  This leads to a further distinction between two kinds of Actual Grace: operative and cooperative. 

Operative Grace

The sinner finds himself in a literal “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario.  Under his own power, he can never turn or return to God.  Justification and sanctification requires Divine intervention.  This intervention however must be done in such a way that it is still an act of the person’s will to repent.  Put in more theological terms, actual grace must prompt the sinner to return to God.  This “knocking at the door” is what is called operative grace.  Operative grace, according to the Council of Trent’s Decree on Justification, is the grace that moves that touches the person and movies them towards a desire to conversion.  More specifically it tackles the catch-22 so “that in adults the beginning of that justification must proceed from the predisposing grace of God …whereby, without any merits on their part, they are called; that they who by sin had been cut off from God, may be disposed through His quickening and helping grace to convert themselves to their own justification by freely assenting to and cooperating with that grace.” 

The whole purpose of this operating grace is to pave the way for the second “type” of actual grace, cooperating grace.  Once that operative grace is consented to, once the person decides that “yes, I desire conversion” they must still move to “open the door.”  This movement towards conversion is the work of cooperating grace.  This grace too, requires the consent of free will and can be rejected. 

Two Saintly Examples

Two famous conversion stories will help to shed light on how these two graces work.  The first is St. Paul’s Road to Damascus encounter with Our Lord.  The story is well known, but we can couch it in terms of actual grace to make the distinction between the two kinds clearer.  The powerful operative grace comes specifically when Our Lord invades Saul’s life saying, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”  St. Paul acknowledges a desire for conversion by asking, “Who are you, sir?”  Now Our Lord offers St. Paul a cooperating grace: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what you must do.”  St. Paul consents and the actual grace moves him to go to Damascus.

From that moment forward, cooperating grace becomes the motivating force for all the supernaturally good actions in St. Paul’s life.  It sustains the supernatural movement in his life always with his free will consent.  So powerful is this force that it prompts him to tell the Corinthians “by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective. Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them; not I, however, but the grace of God [that is] with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).

A second famous example shows how operative grace might be accepted but how we can run from cooperative grace.  St. Augustine in his Confessions tells how he “had prayed, ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ For I was afraid lest thou shouldst hear me too soon, and too soon cure me of my disease of lust which I desired to have satisfied rather than extinguished” (Book 9, Ch. 7).  Consent to the operative grace occurs (he prays), but there is no will to accept the cooperative grace.  This is instructive because it shows how operating grace does not come just once, but many times.  In Augustine’s case the frequency of the invitation was greatly increased because of the prayer of his saintly mother, Monica.  This ought to prompt us to ask God very specifically and repeatedly to send operative graces to those whom we know personally to convert.

To summarize, we can once again turn to Augustine.  Like St. Paul, St. Augustine understood the operations of actual grace from experience earning him the title Doctor of Grace.  There is no better summary of the action of actual grace then his:

“For He who first works in us the power to will is the same who cooperates in bringing this work to perfection in those who will it. Accordingly, the Apostle says: ‘I am convinced of this, that he who has begun a good work in you will bring it to perfection until the day of Christ Jesus’ (Phil 1:6). God, then, works in us, without our cooperation, the power to will, but once we begin to will, and do so in a way that brings us to act, then it is that He cooperates with us. But if He does not work in us the power to will or does not cooperate in our act of willing, we are powerless to perform good works of a salutary nature.”

Free Will and Grace, 17.33

On Spiritual Communion

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Gratis vilis, that is, cheap grace, the supposed grace we receive when we treat the grace of the Sacraments as something automatically received is an ever-present danger of the Church.  Although the Sacraments do objectively contain grace, the reception of these graces depend upon the disposition of the receiver.  To think otherwise is to treat the Sacraments as if they were magic.  This “magical thinking” was discussed in a previous post and some of its ecclesiastical manifestations were brought forward in illustration.  It was briefly mentioned that all of us can fall into this mentality if we are not diligent.  In this post, I would like to discuss how to avoid allowing this Sacramental presumption to creep in.

The Occidental Accident

Despite the fact that the religious freedom is waning in the West, most occidental Catholics have ready access to the Sacraments.  They only need to get in their car and drive to their local Parish which is only a few miles away and they can go to Mass or Confession.  This blessing carries with it a curse—it can create a Sacramental routine by which they do not always discern how great a gift the Sacraments really are.  But this occidental blessing is merely accidental.  Catholics in the Middle East and in China, for example, by no means share the same privilege.  Neither did the Catholics trapped behind the Iron Curtain nor those in Revolutionary France nor Elizabethan England nor the Early Church.  Perhaps the Western “vocations crisis” will get far worse than it already has and availing ourselves of the Sacraments will become far harder.  The point is that this privilege is not always a given and it is something that we need to be constantly grateful for.

This Sacramental ease of access can cause us to make their reception routine only if we allow it to.  There is a sure-fire way to avoid this by adopting a practice that many of the Catholics (or at least those who remained Catholic) did in those times of Sacramental scantiness—Spiritual Communion. 

We are all familiar with the idea what is commonly referred to as a Baptism of Desire.  A person may receive the effects of Sacramental Baptism when, unable for some reason to actually receive the Sacrament, they express either an implicit or explicit desire for baptism.  This “Sacrament by Desire” is by no means limited to Baptism.  In truth the effects of all of the Sacraments can be experienced when a person expresses a desire for the Sacrament but because of some reason outside of their own control they are unable to receive it.  As St. Thomas puts it in the Summa Theologiae “This sacrament has of itself the power of bestowing grace; nor does anyone possess grace before receiving this sacrament except from some desire thereof; from his own desire, as in the case of the adult. or from the Church’s desire in the case of children, as stated above (III:73:3). Hence it is due to the efficacy of its power, that even from desire thereof a man procures grace whereby he is enabled to lead the spiritual life. It remains, then, that when the sacrament itself is really received, grace is increased, and the spiritual life perfected: yet in different fashion from the sacrament of Confirmation, in which grace is increased and perfected for resisting the outward assaults of Christ’s enemies. But by this sacrament grace receives increase, and the spiritual life is perfected, so that man may stand perfect in himself by union with God” (ST III q.79 a.1 ad 3).

Communion of Desire

The list of “Sacraments of Desire” is not limited to just Baptism and Confirmation, but also includes, in a very special way, the Eucharist.  For a baptized person to express a desire to be baptized would be non-sensical, but for a Catholic who has received the Eucharist in the past to express a desire to receive it again not only makes good sense but is an important spiritual practice.  In fact, the Council of Trent said that there are actually three ways in which a person might receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the first two of which are Sacramentally and Spiritually.  “Now as to the use of this holy sacrament, our Fathers have rightly and wisely distinguished three ways of receiving it. For they have taught that some receive it sacramentally only, to wit sinners: others spiritually only, those to wit who eating in desire that heavenly bread which is set before them, are, by a lively faith which worketh by charity, made sensible of the fruit and usefulness thereof…”( Council of Trent Session 13, Chapter VIII).

It is the third way of receiving that most interests us here.  The Council taught that “the third (class) receive it both sacramentally and spiritually, and these are they who so prove and prepare themselves beforehand, as to approach to this divine table clothed with the wedding garment” (ibid).  And in so doing they linked Spiritual Communion with Sacramental Communion.  Those who routinely express a desire to receive the Eucharist when they are unable, not only receive the effects of the Eucharist in expressing the desire, but more perfectly receive the effect of union with Christ and the Church in faith and charity when they do receive the Eucharist sacramentally.  In short, the regular practice of Spiritual Communion is not only for those who are living in times of Sacramental deprivation, but also those who can’t, for whatever reason, receive Our Lord in the Eucharist, whenever and wherever the desire arises within them. 

This is a theme that St. John Paul II included in his encyclical on the Eucharist, Ecclesia de Eucharistia :“ Precisely for this reason it is good to cultivate in our hearts a constant desire for the sacrament of the Eucharist. This was the origin of the practice of ‘spiritual communion’, which has happily been established in the Church for centuries and recommended by saints who were masters of the spiritual life. Saint Teresa of Jesus wrote: ‘When you do not receive communion and you do not attend Mass, you can make a spiritual communion, which is a most beneficial practice; by it the love of God will be greatly impressed on you’.” (EE,34).

Before discussing how to make a Spiritual Communion, it is good to discuss a few caveats.  First, while it is good to receive the Sacrament by desire, the Sacraments were established to be taken in full reality.  Spiritual Communion is never a substitute for Sacramental Communion, but only a “holding over” until actually receiving the Eucharist is possible.  Secondly, only a person who is properly disposed to receive the effects of the Sacramental Communion can truly express the desire that is a Spiritual Communion.  Certainly, a person who is not disposed may still desire it, but it is not yet efficacious because they lack the perfect contrition (expressed through Sacramental Confession) necessary to receive its effects.

St. Alphonsus Liguori was an enthusiastic proponent of Spiritual Communion, so much so that he wrote an entire book explaining how to do it along with a meditation for each day of the month.  I cannot encourage the reader enough to grab a copy of this book, but in the meantime, and in closing, I offer the simple prayer that the Doctor of Church left us for articulating our desire in prayer:

My Jesus, I believe that You are present in the Most Holy Sacrament. I love You above all things, and I desire to receive You into my soul. Since I cannot at this moment receive You sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace You as if You were already there and unite myself wholly to You. Never permit me to be separated from You.  Amen.

On Transubstantiation

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In tracing the history of the Church, we find that whenever the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was challenged, the Church has turned to the dogma of Transubstantiation as a bulwark.  Our present age, in which a crisis of unbelief has arisen, also needs to be reminded of the powerful explanatory power attached to this doctrine.  For it offers an explanation of how Our Lord comes to be present on the altar that accords with reason all while showing the impossibility of positions contrary to the true doctrine.  In our very practical age, this explanation has fallen into disuse and even mockery and so it is important for Catholics to be able to put forth a reasonable explanation.

The Church has long preferred this explanation because it so simply accords with experience.  It was first introduced in 1215, was reaffirmed during the Council of Trent and defended as dogma by Pope Pius VI (1786) when the Synod of Pistoja wished to dismiss it as a “purely scholastic question.”  In short, Transubstantiation is no mere speculation, but instead belongs to the deposit of faith.  It is the belief that a Sacramental miracle occurs on the altar when the substances of the bread and wine is turned into the substances of Christ’s Body and Blood.

Philosophical Foundation

Lacking the philosophical language of our predecessors, this requires some explanation.  First, we define a substance as a distinct individual thing that exists independently of other things.  Each substance carries with it non-essential properties that we call accidents.  These include things like texture, taste, and color.  These accidents depend upon the substance themselves for existence.  A piece of bread is an individual substance that has the nature of bread and does not depend on anything other individual thing for existence.  Taste does not exist independently of the thing it is the taste of so that the taste of the bread depends on the piece of bread for its existence.  Likewise, two pieces of bread may taste differently, but still be bread.

Given all that exists does so either as substance or accident, then we can say there are two types of change—substantial and accidental.  A substantial change is one in which a thing is transformed into another things.  The most obvious example of a substantial change is nutrition.  A piece of bread is eaten and become a muscle cell (for example) in the body of the animal that eats it.  Bread and muscle cells are of completely different kinds and thus a substantial change has occurred.   An accidental change is one in which only the accidents attached to a particular substance change.  The leaves of an oak tree may turn green to yellow, but in so doing the oak tree remains the specific oak tree that it was prior to the change.  The substance did not change, but the accidents did.

We should notice one last thing before returning to the Eucharist and that is that any change always requires some subject that is changed.  Put another way, in order to speak properly of change we must have something that remains constant throughout the change.  Change may be the transformation from one being to another, but it is never a change from being to non-being back to being.  That would not be change, but annihilation coupled with creation.  For accidental change, the subject is obviously the substance itself.  The leaves of the oak tree change from green to yellow, but the oak tree remains.  Even a substantial change, in which one thing becomes another, has a principle of continuity which we call primary matter.  This principle is a little complicated to briefly explain, but we can view is as the matter that undergoes the change from one type to another when it is taken up by a new form.  Take for example the fact that the matter of the bread is taken up by the body and becomes the matter of the muscle cell. 

The Doctrine Itself

With this foundation in place, we can now set our sights on the altar and ask what this can tell us what happens to the bread and wine.  We are left with three alternatives—an accidental change, a substantial change or no change at all (i.e. a symbol).  We will examine each one in light of all that we have said.

First there is an accidental change.  An accidental chance would mean that the substance of the bread of wine would not change, but only their accidents.  Christ’s Body and Blood would be attached to the bread and wine.  This would mean that they would leave His heavenly abode and come to the altar.  The problem with this view is that He would be limited in His presence to one place at a time.  It would imply an accidental change not just in the bread and wine, but in Christ Himself as He moves from place to place.  Those familiar with Luther’s view will recognize this as consubstantiation and it proves why it is necessarily false.

With the elimination of an accidental change we can turn to a substantial change which would mean that the substances of the bread and wine are transformed into the substance of Christ’s Body and Blood.  This initially has appeal because it does not require any accidental change in Christ Himself and thus allows for the ubiquity of His presence on the many altars simultaneously.  This is possible because unlike a natural substantial change the bread and wine are changed not into some new forms, but already existing ones of Christ’s Body and Blood.  Thus there is no change in Christ’s members but in the bread and wine. 

It is not an annihilation and then creation, but a true change.  The subject of change are, miraculously, the accidents of bread and wine.  They remain on both sides of the change.  As St. Thomas puts it, “whereas in natural transmutation the matter of the one receives the form of the other, the previous form being laid aside. Secondly, they have this in common, that on both sides something remains the same; whereas this does not happen in creation: yet differently; for the same matter or subject remains in natural transmutation; whereas in this sacrament the same accidents remain.” (ST q.75, art. 8).  It is this miraculous change that we call Transubstantiation.

This suspension of the accidents, leads to no evidence of change that is discernible to the senses.  Any attempt to empirically prove that the change has occurred would ultimately fall flat because they can only measure the accidents.  This is why some confuse it for symbol.  This is also why ultimately the recently conducted Pew survey that found that 70% of Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence represents first and foremost a crisis in faith.  It is only the ears, attuned to the words of Christ, that can discern this change.  Reason can eliminate the possibility of consubstantiation but only faith can prove that it is really Christ present.

Where We Got the Bible

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In an age marked by an exaggerated ecumenism, there is a tendency to paper over important differences that, once argued and resolved, could readily become a means of true unity.  Take for example the question of “how many books there are in the Bible?”  This question is not really one of personal faith, but historical fact.  Still it tends to be largely ignored because the facts are not really known on either side.  For this reason it is instructive for us to examine the history of the canon of Sacred Scripture.

To properly speak of a “canon” of Scripture, there are some necessary distinctions that need to be made.  First, the word canon is a theological term that was first used in the Fourth Century AD.  Prior to that the term Scriptures was used to distinguish those books that were inspired from those that were not.  This is important because, as Vatican I taught, the Church in recognizing the canon, was not bestowing inspiration upon certain books, but acknowledging that those books contained in the canon were inspired.  So properly speaking the Church did not “decide” the canon but merely recognized that the books contained in it were inspired and was tasked with preserving and protecting them.

Judaism and the “Canon” of the Old Testament

Second, there was no set canon within Judaism at the time of Our Lord.  Judaism was not a monolithic religion and different sects had different beliefs as to which books from the Hebrew Scriptures were inspired.  The Sadducees, for example, believed only that the five books of Moses were inspired (which is why Our Lord reprimands them for not knowing the Scriptures when they denied the resurrection in Mt 19).  The Pharisees on the other hand included other books, but disputed over the status of Ecclesiastes, Esther and the Song of Solomon.  The Essenes, the group from whom the Dead Sea Scrolls have been excavated, accepted even more, including some that are not found in any of the Christian Scriptures.

The point is that there was no accepted central authority within Judaism that could canonize the Scriptures.  This is one of the things that they thought the Messiah would do (c.f. John 4:25).  This dispute over which books were considered Scriptures lasted well into the second century and beyond.  This point is also important to consider because of a popular myth, perpetuated mainly by Protestants (especially Norman Geisler) that there was a Jewish council at Jamnia around the year 100 that closed the Jewish canon.  The end result was a canon of 22 books; the same set found in most Protestant Bibles.

If they did not recognize the Messiah whose role it was to discern the Scriptures, then by what authority could they have declared a fixed canon?  Furthermore, there is absolutely no historical evidence for such a formal council.  It appears that this was made up by H.E. Ryle as a defense of the Protestant subtraction of books from the Christian canon.  More on this in a moment.

What the Jews did begin to do, although in nothing like a formal way, was create a wall around their Scriptures in order to fend off the evangelization efforts of the Christians—Greek speaking and Greek Bible-reading Christians specifically.  So naturally one of the ways they would do this was to de-emphasize or even accept those books written in Greek.  It was for this reason that Christians, starting with St. Athanasius began making distinctions between what he referred to as “canonical” and what he called “other books.”  The “other books” were simply those books, that though considered to be inspired by the Christians, were not useful for evangelizing and argumentation with Jews.

How do we know that these books were considered inspired, even though not listed among Athanasius’ canon?  Because they were all approved to be used within the liturgy.  This is an important point that cannot be overlooked.  Books that were used in the liturgy were considered to be sacred and authentically the Word of God; lex orandi, lex credendi—the law of prayer is the law of belief.  In an age where literacy was low encounters with the Scriptures happened regularly in the liturgy.  Even if they were not able to read, they were still well versed in the Word of God for this reason.

It was the usefulness of the two groups of Scriptures that led St. Jerome to wrongly make the canon-deuterocanon distinction, positing that the latter were not inspired.  This conflating of usefulness with inspiration was an error that persisted even into the Middle Ages.  There are no degrees of inspiration, it either is or it isn’t.  But there are degrees of usefulness.  It is clear that Genesis has greater use than Tobit, but that does not mean the latter is not inspired.  It was in light of this that the Church spoke definitively as to which books were canonical and could be read in the liturgy at the Council of Carthage in 418.  This same list, which included the so-called deuterocanonical books, was reaffirmed throughout the centuries including at the Council of Florence almost 80 years before Luther drove the nail into his 95 theses.  The “Counter Reformational” Council of Trent merely reaffirmed the list and declared it to be a belief that was to be definitively held.  A solemn declaration had become necessary because for the first time since the third Century someone had challenged the contents.

Luther’s Role

Martin Luther did not actually remove books from the Bible as is commonly thought.  To do so would have been far too radical.  What he did do though is revive the canon-deuterocanon distinction.  His German translation reformatted the Bible so that the books in question appeared in the back of the Old Testament texts. Eventually he labeled them Apocrypha, prefacing them with a note that these were“books which are not held equal to the holy Scriptures and yet are profitable and good to read.”  The logical question is why he would have included them in the Bible to begin with unless they were actually in the Bible.  Why not remove them altogether?  Instead he pulled a little bait and switch by a common heretical trick that remains down to our day—gradualism.

This highlights the difficulty with the “Jewish Council” defense or anything like it.  Why would you remove books from the Christian Bible based upon Jewish authority?  Given the choice between 1500 years of Christian practice and dubious Jewish authority, why would you choose the latter?  For Luther and his progeny that was a red herring.  Books, in his view, should be included in the Bible only insofar as they confirm his authority.  He is very clear about that.  At first he quoted the books of Wisdom and Sirach in his own apology against indulgences.  But when those books were shown to reveal other things he didn’t agree with, he did not argue but instead questioned their authority.

Blessed John Henry Newman once quipped that to be steeped in history is to cease to be Protestant.  While he meant that once we study the Church Fathers it becomes clear that they were Catholic.  But his dictum can be taken in a deeper sense in that once we study the history of the Bible we come to see that the Protestant position regarding the contents of Scripture is wrong.  For a group of Christians who believe only in the authority of Scripture this is highly problematic to say the least and Catholics in charity owe it to them to set the record straight.