What are the Sacraments of Initiation? The Sacraments of Initiation are Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist. These sacraments, by drawing us toward full stature in Christ, empower us to carry out our mission as Christians in both the Church and the world. What are the effects of the sacraments of initiation? Through these sacraments, first of all, we are freed from the power of darkness by being baptized into Christ's death and resurrection.
And secondly, we receive the Spirit, who makes us adopted sons and daughters of the Father, and incorporates us into the Church, the people of God, with whom we celebrate the Eucharistic memorial of Christ's paschal mystery. Do the sacraments parallel our natural human growth? Yes, Catholic tradition has compared the stages of our natural human development with those of our Christian spiritual life. Thus it relates, physical generation with baptism, our spiritual regeneration.
It relates growing into maturity with confirmation. It relates physical nourishment with the Eucharist, the bread of life. It relates physical and psychological healing with reconciliation and anointing.
And it relates community realities of family life and leadership with matrimony and orders. What is the value of such a comparison? Comparing the similarities between our natural growth process with the sacraments helps us appreciate how intrinsic our Christian spiritual growth is to our full human self-becoming.
But the comparison also brings out the uniqueness of the sacraments as encounters with the risen Christ, our Lord and Savior, through whom we share God's own life of love as members of His body, the Church. The sacraments of Christian initiation, baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist lay the foundations of every Christian life. The sharing in the divine nature given to men through the grace of Christ bears a certain likeness to the origin, development, and nourishing of natural life.
The faithful are born anew by baptism, strengthened by the sacrament of confirmation, and receive in the Eucharist the food of eternal life. By means of these sacraments of Christian initiation, they thus receive in increasing measure the treasures of the divine life and advance toward the perfection of charity. Music Baptism is the principal place for the first and fundamental conversion.
It is by faith in the Gospel and by baptism that one renounces evil and gains salvation, that is, the forgiveness of all sins and the gift of new life. call to conversion continues to resound in the lives of Christians. It is the movement of a contrite heart, drawn and moved by grace to respond to the merciful love of God who loved us first.
By the sacrament of confirmation, the baptized, are more perfectly bound to the the Church, and are enriched with a special strength of the Holy Spirit. Hence they are, as true witnesses of Christ, more strictly obliged to spread and defend the faith by word and deed. The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life.
The other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it. For in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ himself, our past. The sharing in the divine nature given to men through the grace of Christ bears a certain likeness to the origin, development, and nourishing of natural life. The faithful are born anew by baptism, strengthened by the sacrament of confirmation, and receive in the Eucharist the food of eternal life. By means of these sacraments of Christian initiation, they thus receive in increasing measure the treasures of the divine life and advance toward the perfection of charity.
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