sacramentality. When the "fullness of time" came, what was needed for the world to be saved? It was necessary that "the only Son who is in the bosom of the Father" be "born of a woman," that he dwell among us, and that, through contact with his bodily presence and his bloody Passion in a particular time and place, he could cause the superabundance of messianic grace around him to overflow onto his Church, a grace capable of dispelling the night of sin by illuminating hearts. "That which we have seen with our eyes, that which we have touched with our hands concerning the Word of life, ... we proclaim to you so that you may be in communion with us" (1 John 1:1-3). Without this touch and this influx of life, the Church could never have come into being.

And without this same touch and influx of life, the Church could never subsist. The purity and holiness that Christ demands of his Spouse is too sublime, and left to us alone we are too vulnerable, too fragile, too inconstant to resist for very long the "spirit of the world." This is why the Savior, before reassuming the glory which he had "before the world was," arranged on earth the seven sacraments, the seven liturgical actions which he will use as instruments to touch us bodily and communicate the influx of life to us.

The sacraments are the spatiotemporal extension of the amazing bodily gestures by which Christ forgave sins and healed the wounds of hearts. There is a relationship between Christ allowing divine holiness to be shown through him and communicating it to us and the sacraments signifying the divine grace which they give: purification by the water of Baptism, spiritual anointing by the sacred oil, and so on. Additionally, the sacraments are constantly referred to the Passion and the Resurrection of the Savior. They are signs, reminders in which the Passion, the cause of our salvation, is commemorated, the effect of grace from the Passion is designated, and future glory is announced and promised.78

God alone is the Author of grace, which is in us a participation in the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4). But he can communicate it to us mediately "using either the humanity of Christ as an instrument conjoined to his person, or the sacrament as a separated instrument: in such a way that the power by which we are saved [virtus salutifera] is derived from the divinity of Christ through his humanity in the sacraments themselves. . . . It is manifest that the sacraments of the Church have their power specially from the Passion of Christ, and this power touches us, quodam modo nobis copulatur, every

78 ST III, q. 60, a. 3. Cf. the refrain of the Magnificat at second vespers of the Feast of Corpus Christi: "O sacrum convivium in quo Christus sumitur: recolitur memoria passionis ejus, mens impletur gratia, et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur"-" O sacred banquet, in which Christ is received: the memorial of his passion is renewed, the soul is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us."

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The Mystery of Sacramentality: Christ, the Church, and the Seven Sacraments

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