Continuing our series on the Catholic economy of salvation, we move from our first installment’s consideration of faith, hope, and charity, to a look at the sacraments. We will not address each and every sacrament here, but will confine ourselves to three: Baptism, Penance, and the Eucharist.

Repent, and Be Baptized!

Remember that passage from Acts 16 that we talked about last time? The prison guard had asked St. Paul and Silas, “Masters, what must I do, that I may be saved?” to which these great missionaries said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” Two verses later, in Acts 16:33, we read this: “and he was baptized at once, with all his family.” We do not know how old the guard’s children were, but it has long been argued that such accounts of entire households being baptized is an argument for paedobaptism — that is, infant Baptism. There is an earlier mention in this very same chapter of Acts (16:15) of another such instance — the household of Lydia.

Baptism is necessary for salvation. This first and most foundational Christian sacrament is not optional — as the Council of Trent has infallibly taught.¹ There is, of course, a solid Scriptural basis for this teaching on the necessity of Baptism. Here are 10 passages from the New Testament that show us this:

1. John 3:5: “Jesus answered, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.'”

These are the words of Our Lord to Nicodemus. An interesting note on this is that “the Kingdom of God” is not exclusively an eschatological reality. It exists on earth, too. It is the Church. One cannot enter this kingdom without Baptism, which also introduces us into the sacramental life — giving us a claim on the Eucharist and also, to a greater or lesser degree, to the other sacraments.

In order to appreciate this passage, we really need to look at the context, so I suggest that readers take a look at John 3:1-21. Note the words of verse 13, “No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man [who is in heaven].” (See the Rheims translation here.)

As baptized members of the Mystical Body, we are part of “the Whole Christ” (Saint Augustine) — “members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones” (Eph. 5:30), in the trenchant words of Saint Paul. Because that is so, we may ascend with Jesus Christ, who is a new Jacob’s ladder reaching down from Heaven to earth to bring us Heavenward. This makes sense of those paradoxical words of Jesus to Nicodemus in John 3:13: In the Incarnation, the Logos descended from Heaven to dwell corporeally on earth (cf. Col. 2:9; 2 Cor. 5:19). At the end of His temporal mission, the Man-God ascended into Heaven. Yet the whole time, both as a divine Person who is one of the Trinity and as Man partaking of the Beatific Vision, He could properly be said to be in Heaven. Applied to us, His members, this mystery of Christ’s Ascension continues in time, and will continue till the very consummation of all things.

Using the Scriptural Reference index at the end of the latest version of Denzinger’s, I checked all thirteen references to John 3:5 in the Church’s magisterial texts contained in that massive volume, and all but one are explicit references to the Sacrament of Baptism. The one exception, from Lumen Gentium, really also appears to be a reference to Baptism, though it is not explicitly so. The dates span from the year 418 to 2000. It is utterly unambiguous that the Catholic Church, in her most solemn doctrinal teaching, considers John 3:5 to be a reference to the Sacrament of Baptism.

Here are the remaining nine Biblical passages on Baptism:

2. Matt. 28:18-20: “And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the close of the age.'”
3. Mark 16:15-16: “And he said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.'”
   Comment: Faith and Baptism are necessary for salvation. Without faith, Baptism is useless.
4. Acts 2:38: “And Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.'”
5. Acts 22:16: (Words of Ananias to Saul of Tarsus:) “And now why do you wait? Rise and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on his name.”
   Comment: Jesus appeared to Saint Paul, but later sent the soon-to-be Apostle to one of his ministers for Baptism to wash away his sins.
6. Romans 6:3-4: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”
7. Galatians 3:27: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”
8. Colossians 2:12: “And you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.”
9. Titus 3:5: “He saved us, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but in virtue of his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit.”
10. 1 Peter 3:21: “Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a clear conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

In the above passages, three explicitly link salvation to Baptism, one equates being a disciple of Christ with Baptism, two equate it to the forgiveness of sins, two equate it with dying and resurrecting with Christ, and one says that by it, we have “put on Christ.” The supernatural causality that the New Testament writers attribute to Baptism connotes that it is not merely a sign but an efficacious sign — a sign that effects what it signifies. That, by definition, is a Christian sacrament.

‘The Unrighteous Will Not Inherit the Kingdom of God’

Nobody who calls himself a Christian believes you can get to Heaven without being justified. That is to say, justice, in the Biblical sense of holiness (also called righteousness, sanctifying grace, habitual grace, friendship with God) is absolutely necessary for salvation. But, we must maintain that state of justification in our souls by avoiding mortal sin, i.e., sin which destroys the life of grace in the soul. This truth shows the necessity of good works, for avoiding the evil of mortal sin is itself a good work — a topic for a later Ad Rem. But, this truth further points us to the necessity of the sacrament of Penance or Confession.

Here are eight Biblical proofs for the necessity of staying in sanctifying grace by avoiding mortal sin:

1. Hebrews 12:14: “Strive for peace with all men, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.”
2. 1 John 5:16–17: “If any one sees his brother committing what is not a deadly sin, he will ask, and God will give him life for those whose sin is not deadly. There is sin which is deadly; I do not say that one is to pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not deadly.”
   Comment: “Mortal,” as in “mortal sin,” means deadly. Obviously, the Beloved Disciple is not talking about physical death here, but something worse. This is a clear expression of the difference between mortal and venial sin.
3. Galatians 5:2–4: “Now I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. I testify again to every man who receives circumcision that he is bound to keep the whole law. You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.”
   Comment: In the context, Saint Paul is dealing with what we call the Judaizers, that is, those who believed that Christians must observe the Old Law, like Jews. This matter was settled in Apostolic times, at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, about the year 48 or 50. According to the Apostle of the Gentiles, by insisting on observing the law of types and shadows, these Galatians were cutting themselves off from Him whom the Law foreshadowed: Jesus Christ. That is to transition from righteousness to unrighteousness — from the state of grace to the state of mortal sin.
4. 1 Corinthians 6:9–10: “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
   Comment: This text is similar to the following from Galatians.
5. Galatians 5:19–21: “Now the works of the flesh are plain: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”
   Comment: What do these passages prove? St. Paul is writing to believing Christians in Corinth and Galatia and telling them not to do things that will prevent them from entering the Kingdom of God or Heaven. Pretty clear!
6. Hebrews 10:26–29: “For if we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire which will consume the adversaries. A man who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy at the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of God, and profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace?”
   Comment: Again, the Apostle is writing to believing Christians and telling them where deliberate sin after our conversion leads, namely, to “a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire which will consume the adversaries….” That’s not Heaven!
7. 1 Corinthians 3:16–17: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If any one destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are.”
   Comment: Sounds pretty menacing, doesn’t it? You are God’s temple; destroy that, and God destroys you. What is our greatest dignity becomes, if corrupted, our greatest humiliation. Corruptio optimi pessima. “Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required; and of him to whom men commit much they will demand the more.” — Luke 12:48.
8. 2 Peter 2:20–22: “For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. It has happened to them according to the true proverb, The dog turns back to his own vomit, and the sow is washed only to wallow in the mire.”
   Comment: Defilements and vomit and mire, oh my! That surely is not once saved, always saved.

‘Confess Your Sins’

What do we do about sin that we committed that made us lose our righteousness, our justification, our friendship with God — in other words, our sanctifying grace? God’s economy of salvation makes provision for this problem of sin, especially mortal sin, with the sacrament Saint Jerome called “the second plank after shipwreck” (Saint Thomas agrees with him); we call it Penance, or Confession.

Here are some texts which give a foundation for this sacrament:

1. Matthew 16:19: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
   Comment: These words of Jesus, spoken directly to Saint Peter are a rabbinical formulation that refers to a divine authority to forbid and permit, or retain and remit.
2. Matthew 18:18: “Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
   Comment: Here the same authority is extended beyond Peter alone to the Apostles collectively — the episcopal college.

The institution of the sacrament of Penance took place on the first Easter Sunday and is found in Saint John’s Gospel:

• John 20:21-23: “Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.’ And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.'”

There is a “new creation” taking place here as the words echo Genesis 2:7, where God breathes the breath of life into Adam. A new power is being given with this breath of the Holy Ghost. As Jesus is sent by the Father, so he sends his Apostles, not only to preach (which is essential), but also to baptize and to forgive sins. The very mission of the Apostles and their eventual successors is sacramental in character. The mention of retaining sin is critical: Many non-Catholics will say that they can forgive sins in the sense of forgiving the wrongs committed against themselves by another. (We Catholics, lay and clerical alike, are called to do that, as is clear from the Our Father and many other Biblical passages.) But this is an exercise not only of loosing (forgiving), but also of binding (not forgiving, or retaining). I have never met a Protestant who, when asked, can point to men in his denomination with that power. At times priest confessors must refuse absolution of a sin for grave reason, such as lack of contrition or firm purpose, or, in the confessional praxis of Saint Alphonsus de Ligouri, making recidivist mortal sinners wait for absolution while they correct their deeply ingrained behaviors that keep sending them back into the confessional with the same grave sins. The penitentiaries in use in the Church until the Middle Ages sternly regulated such things, and while the practice of deferring absolution is less frequent today, there are still circumstances when it should or must be done.

Additional passages from the New Testament also point to this sacrament:

1. 2 Corinthians 5:18-20: “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.”
   Comment: The apostolic ministry is not only one of preaching and teaching, but of reconciling sinners by exercising Christ’s own mediatorial powers that He gave in John 20:21-23.
2. James 5:14-16 (which is also a locus classicus for Extreme Unction): “Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.”
   Comment: The word translated here “elders,” πρεσβύτεροι (presbyteroi), comes into English in two ways: the obvious cognate word presbyters, imported directly from the Greek, and the less obvious word that came from Greek through Latin through the High German, prestar, into modern English: priest. Mindful that Jesus Christ gave authority to forgive and to retain forgiveness to the Apostles and that the Church always held this sacramental endowment of Jesus Christ to continue in the Catholic priesthood, we should note that the Apostolic command here to “confess your sins one to another” would be out of place if there were not someone to do what is enjoined here: forgive sins — not merely personal injuries but objective offenses against God.
3. 1 Corinthians 5:1-5: “It is actually reported that there is immorality among you… Let him who has done this be removed from among you… you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.”
   Comment: Saint Paul here exercises the judgment of an Apostle upon a terrible adulterer in Corinth. This is the retaining side of John 20:23 in concrete action.
4. 2 Corinthians 2:6-8, 10: “For such a one this punishment by the majority is enough; so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him… Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. What I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ.”
   Comment: Here, that same sinner is “loosed” from his sin. He has been absolved. The passage translated here “in the presence of Christ” in v. 10 is ἐν προσώπῳ Χριστοῦ (en prosōpō Christou) literally means “in the person of Christ,” which is exactly how Catholic priests are said to act when they confect sacraments.
5. 1 John 1:8-9: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

‘My Flesh Is Food Indeed, and My Blood Is Drink Indeed’

Baptism is the most foundational and most necessary of all the sacraments. It is the gateway to the entire sacramental economy. However, the greatest of the sacraments is the one that, in addition to imparting the grace of Christ, also contains Jesus Christ Himself: the Holy Eucharist. It is for this reason that it is called, by way of excellence, the Blessed Sacrament.

Our Lord set the stage for the institution of this most magnificent of His seven mysteries in the “Bread of Life” sermon at the synagogue in Capharnaum, related in John 6, of which this is a central passage:

• John 6:53–55: “So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.'”

The institution of the Holy Eucharist took place just before Our Lord suffered His Passion, at the Last Supper, and is narrated by the three Synoptic Gospels in Matthew 26:26–28, Mark 14:22–24, and Luke 22:19–20, and also by Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:23–25.

There is an excellent tract posted on our site, “The Catholic Religion Proved by the Protestant Bible.” The section on the Holy Eucharist gives a vibrant Biblical defense of Catholic teaching on this point. The Church of History cites many of the Fathers of the Church defending the Catholic doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament. Joshua Charles has an excellent collection of articles on the subject, with many citations from the Fathers, at Eternal Christendom.

Because I do not want to prolong this Ad Rem, I will say very little about this Greatest of Sacraments here — the one in which the Heart of Jesus poured out His boundless love of man to unite us most intimately with Himself.

Jesus challenged His hearers in that Eucharistic discourse at Capharnaum, and it was the contention of our Founder, Father Leonard Feeney, that the Holy Eucharist is and must ever remain a challenge. I will conclude these lines with two paragraphs from my mentor, Brother Francis, introducing Father Feeney’s wonderful discourse, The Eucharist in Four Simple Mysteries:

Father Feeney believed, and taught forcefully, that the challenge of the Eucharist must remain in our day just as hard as when Our Savior uttered those immortal words [at Capharnaum]. The Church has the duty to do that, and people can accept the challenge or reject it. For those who accept it, it shall be well with them and infinite blessings will fall upon them, and upon the world, because of them. But for those who reject it, well, it is too bad for them, but the Church will have discharged its duty.

This is the issue of salvation as Father Feeney saw it. It is not merely a legal issue nor even a moral one. It does not rest on canon law, nor merely on pronouncements of popes and councils. Important as such measures are, they remain means to protect a truth of a much higher order. The challenge of the Eucharist belongs to the ontological order; namely, it is a matter of being and reality. “Unless you eat Me you shall not have life in you.” Life is life-eternal and means nothing less than salvation.