Sacramental service station?

Filed in Catholic, Faith by on September 12, 2013 2 Comments

A little shout-out to all the parishes out there… Come on now, be honest

Is your parish a sacramental service station?

What do I mean by this? A service station is somewhere we pass through, on the way to something else. We don’t congregate there, it’s never the goal of our journey, it doesn’t serve anything more than providing a loo-break, a flat white ‘to go’, and a bag of wine gums for the car. We’re on our way to somewhere else.

Is this what your parish is treated like? People stop in for what they need – a Baptism, a ‘church wedding’, a First Communion. Then off they go again. Clutching their certificate like a bag of wine gums.

The parish can easily become a service station, when truly it is the place of ‘final destination’ – for no other reason that it is the place of encounter with Christ, who is our Alpha and Omega, our final goal, the One who gives everything else meaning.

Many people have not truly been evangelised; they enter the Church – full of truth, mercy, freedom, splendour, beauty, and, most of all, Christ’s unsurpassable love – grab what they think they want (a sacrament) and hurry out again, without knowing that this is where – if they stop for a little time – the richest treasures of their soul are to be found.

So… what can we do?

The first thing I would say is, we are partly (mostly?) to blame for this phenomenon. We bring people into a small dull waiting-room, without showing them into the beauties of the enormous palace within. We give them one of the palace’s most precious gifts, then let them go on their way.

This is what is increasingly being called, ‘sacramentalisation’. On the face of it, people have been fully ‘initiated’ because they have received the most wonderful graces of the Church – the sacraments – but without receiving any of the preparation to receive such precious gifts – understanding what they are, where they come from in the beautiful palace, how they fit in, what the bigger picture is. And saddest of all, they barely know that these unique gifts come from a Person, Jesus Christ, and that only in relationship with him will they receive fully what they’ve been given. Instead, they think they have ‘got it’, that’s it – there’s nothing else to ‘get’, they are ‘Catholic’, and yet if only they could even glimpse the beauty of the gift-giver behind the palace door…

In George Weigel’s recent book, Evangelical Catholicism, he argues that those parishes who willingly sacramentalise ‘anything that breathes’ (my words not his), severely “undercut” those parishes who are keen to initiate people into the sacraments authentically. These parishes – understanding that ‘evangelical Catholicism’ is needed to evangelise the modern world – want to introduce people to every beautiful mystery in the palace. This way, they know that their guests will receive the full grace of the sacraments when they’re initiated.

Showing people the beauty of the palace, leading them into relationship with Jesus, takes time. It’s not just about ‘learning’ what’s inside, it’s about taking on a whole new way of life that corresponds to this beauty.

When there’s a ‘sacramental service station’ next door, and people can readily obtain the “gift” without being apprenticed into the “life”, the efforts of the ‘evangelical’ parish are undermined. The sacraments are cheapened. The evangelical Catholic parish is seen as “over-demanding”, “strict”, “unreasonable”.

All of this is very clear. Let’s not be the parish who gives out sacraments like sweets, without helping people to know the Person of Jesus Christ.

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About the Author ()

Hannah Vaughan-Spruce is an experienced catechist and youth worker, who now works for the Diocese of Portsmouth. Some of her Jericho Tree articles were first posted at her personal catechetical blog Transformed in Christ. They are used here with permission. See http://www.transformedinchrist.com/

Comments (2)

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  1. Dorothea Rose says:

    I very much enjoyed reading your article. You expressed very clearly what is, sadly, the reality for many Catholics who do not know that it is all about relationship with Jesus and that everything else flows from that.

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