Sacrament Of The Sick

EWTN Global Catholic Radio and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on phonograph records in the 1960s, and the sound quality is sometimes limited, but the word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless. And now, here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Peace be to you. Shakespeare speaks of the ills the flesh is heir to. It is of those ills and sicknesses that we speak in the sacraments of extramunction. The sacrament could also be called the sacrament of the anointing of the sick. First of all, as regards sickness itself, it does many things to us, not only physically, but also psychologically. First of all, it cuts us off from many occasions of sin. The will to sin is certainly weakened by physical infirmity. Then, too, sickness also manifests the uniqueness of our personality. We begin to realize that I am I. Self is confronted with self. The soul sees itself as it really is. Sickness breaks the spell that pleasure is everything, that we ought to go on building bigger and bigger barns, and that life is worthless unless there is a thrill in it. It enables us also to readjust our sense of values. We begin to understand the words of our Lord. What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his immortal soul? Then, too, it can end in death. There is a world of difference between the way the pagan faces death and the way the Christian does. The pagan fears the loss of the body. The Christian fears the loss of the soul. To the Christian, the physical life and the world are not everything. This world is only a scaffolding to him. It is a scaffolding up through which souls climb to the kingdom of heaven. And when the last soul shall have climbed up through it, then it shall be torn down and burnt with fervent fire, not because of his base, but simply because it has done its work. And there is another difference between the pagan and the Christian as regards death. The Christian never feels that his whole being is threatened by death. The pagan does. The pagan is always moving forward toward death. Moving forward toward it. Like as if he were walking toward an abyss. The Christian is walking backwards from death. But how does he walk backwards? Because he starts with that fact. Someday I'm going to die. Someday I must render an account of my stewardship. Knowing that I will die, I now prepare my life so that it may enter the kingdom of heaven. The worst thing, therefore, that can happen to a Christian is not death. The greatest tragedy is not to have loved enough. There's no need of laboring these points. Sickness is very obvious, too obvious indeed. Our Lord was very much concerned about it. Let us now study the background of the sacrament that he instituted. The sacrament of the anointing of the sick. Many of the prophecies that were told about our blessed Lord revealed and heralded him as the healer of the sick. In countless places in the New Testament we read such phrases as these. I am quoting. Jesus went about teaching and preaching the kingdom of God and curing every kind of disease and infirmity. Then again we read in Luke, when our blessed Lord was at Genezareth, the scripture states, and they began bringing the sick to him. Beds and all, wherever they heard he was. And they begged him to let them touch even the hem of his cloak. And all that touched him recovered. Like the Syrophoenician woman, remember? She said, if I but touch the hem of his garment, I shall be healed. The gospel does not tell us all the miracles of healing, but St. John ends up his gospel by saying that if he had written down all of the miracles that our blessed Lord had worked, the world would not be large enough to contain the books thereof. The point is, therefore, our blessed Lord, as the Son of God made man, had the power to heal the sick. Now we come to the second point. He communicated that power to the apostles. After the resurrection, our blessed Lord sent his apostles into the world, and here I am quoting the gospel of Mark, where our blessed Lord said to his apostles, Lay hands upon the sick, and make them recover. And again in the gospel of Luke we read, concerning the apostles, and this is a quotation, They were cures everywhere. How did our Lord communicate this power? How did he tell the apostles to cure? He told them to do so by using oil, because the gospel tells us, and they anointed with oil many sick people and healed them. Our blessed Lord instituted the sacrament of the healing of the sick, or what is called extreme unction, and passed it on to his church. And we find that the early church was using the sacrament just as we use it now. St. James, one of the apostles, writing in his epistle, speaks of this sacrament that had been instituted by our Lord, and he says, Is one of you sick? Let him send for the priests of the church. Let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the Lord's name. Prayer offered in faith will restore the sick man, and the Lord will give him relief. If he is guilty of sins, they will be pardoned. That is the earliest description that we have of the sacrament of the anointing of the sick. Notice that our blessed Lord told his apostles to use oil. Just as our Lord in other sacraments used bread and water, so in this he uses oil because naturally oil was used to strengthen the body. Athletes very often would rub their bodies with oil, and our Lord therefore used it as the matter of the sacrament. Where did this oil come from? It is blessed by the bishop on Holy Thursday. There are three kinds of oils that are blessed on that day. This oil for this particular sacrament is distributed to various parishes. During the year, the priests anoint the sick with that oil. When the bishop blesses and consecrates these oils, he says this particular prayer over the oil that is used in this sacrament. With this heavenly anointing, let none be medicine, but that he shall find protection within and without, gone all pain and sickness, gone every ailment of soul and body. Should there not be a sacrament for the sick, just as there is for the wounded? There is a world of difference between being wounded and being sick, between being cut by a knife and having smallpox. Our blessed Lord has instituted a sacrament for our spiritual wounds, namely the sacrament of penance. So he has a sacrament for the sickness of the body, the body that is united to the soul, to incidentally. And the beauty of this sacrament is that though the grace is communicated to the soul, it influences the body in a very special way. Not in the way in which the divine divinity of our blessed Lord influenced the humanity that he took from his blessed mother, no. But in some mysterious way, the results of the passion of our blessed Lord are poured through the soul into the body. Because you cannot think of any part of the body that has not been a vehicle of sin. This particular sacrament now wants to do away with all of the traces of that sin and thus in some way restore the body again to health if it be God's will. You cannot think of a single sin that did not come through the body. Not a one. Envy? That certainly came through the eyes. For example, you saw how much better the Joneses were doing. And you had to keep up with the Joneses. Pride? Your ear might have been involved. Someone told you that you were very smart, very beautiful. Drunkenness, adultery, robbery, blasphemy, all in some way involved the body that is the object of the sacrament. Even your feet, you walked into an occasion of sin. Even your nose. Your nose could have contributed to vanity. You may have smelled good cooking. It ate too much. Then too, considerable vanity could be involved in the use of perfume. Now when a sin gets into the soul through the body, it always leaves a trace. It's very much like certain diseases. They leave little remembrances behind, not the kind of remembrances that we would like to have. Viruses have tails. Now we're not speaking scientifically. But they do leave vestiges of themselves. That is why certain diseases are not contracted to gain. And that is why also some diseases leave a very important trace and sometimes embarrassing trace. Like smallpox. So does sin. Sin comes into the soul through the body and after a while the body becomes like a chimney in which there has been fire and smoke emitted from the hearth. The chimney becomes full of soot. Ships going through the ocean contract many barnacles. Sewers become clogged. You just cannot have sins pouring through the eyes and the ears and the nose and the feet and so forth without these senses becoming clogged, sooty, dirty, barnacled. The church now purifies the avenues of sin, the eyes and the ears, the nose, the hands and the lips and the feet. And the purification takes place by the anointing with oil and the words of the priest. Now this is what the priest says when he anoints your eyes. By this holy anointing and his most loving mercy may the Lord forgive you whatever wrong you have done by the use of your sight. Amen. And the priest anoints your ears. He says, by this holy anointing and his most loving mercy may the Lord forgive you whatever wrong you have done by the use of your hearing. Amen. And the priest anoints the nose. By this holy anointing and his most loving mercy may the Lord forgive you whatever wrong you have done by the use of the sense of smell. Amen. Then your hands. By this holy anointing and his most loving mercy may the Lord forgive you whatever wrong you have done by the use of your sense of touch. Amen. When the sacrament of extramunction or the anointing of the sick is given to a priest, he is always anointed on the back of his hands. The laity are always anointed on the palm of their hands. The reason why the priest is anointed on the back of his hand is because the palm of his hand was anointed when he was ordained priest. Continuing the sacrament, we come to the lips. By this holy anointing and his most loving mercy may the Lord forgive you whatever wrong you have done by the use of your sense of taste and the power of speech. Amen. Then he anoints your feet. By this holy anointing and his most loving mercy may the Lord forgive you whatever wrong you have done by the use of your power of walking. Amen. Those are the words of the sacrament. Not all the words, but the words that are used in the actual anointing. Now some remarks about it. First, this sacrament is given only in serious illness. The one who receives it must be in some danger of death through sickness. There need not be the certitude of death, no. But at any rate, there must be some danger. That is why the sacrament of the anointing of the sick may not be given to soldiers that are going into battle. They are in danger of death, but not in sickness. They are in danger of death, but not in sickness. If they are wounded, then indeed they could be anointed. Secondly, this sacrament should not be delayed until the patient is unconscious and can no longer join in the prayers. It should be given while he can lift up his soul to the healing power of Christ who is refreshing his senses and his soul and his sins. Thirdly, the sacrament does not mean that the person is going to die. There are many who believe that just as soon as the priest is called to administer this particular sacrament, it means the patient is beyond hope. No, the Council of Trent refused to consider the sacrament of exprimumption only as a sacrament for the dying. The next point, and this is very important. In the administration of this sacrament, there is no mention of death. None whatever. It is not necessarily the sacrament of the dying. It is the sacrament of the sick. Here is the prayer that the priest recites after he has anointed the hands and feet and other members of the body. Now listen to this prayer. Note carefully that the word death is not used. Note also that the burden of the prayer is the restoration of the sick person. Cure we beseech thee, O our Redeemer, by the grace of the Holy Spirit. The ailments of this sick man, or woman as the case may be, heal his wounds and forgive his sins. Deliver him from all miseries of body and mind and mercifully restore him to perfect health, inwardly and outwardly, that having recovered by an act of kindness, he may be able to take up his former duties. Thou who with the Father and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth God, world without end. Amen. See from that prayer that though the sacrament is given at a critical time, it is more concerned with sickness than with death. That is the reason why the sacrament could just as well and possibly even better be called the sacrament of the anointing of the sick. Because when we receive it, grace, of course, is always received with the soul. But as we said before, we are a unit, a composite of body and soul. And here this sacrament has a very special repercussion upon the body. To use a very modern word, we might call it the psychosomatic sacrament. The sacrament of body and soul. It looks to the healing of the body, not clinically, not just as a body, because the Church regards the body very differently than medicine. To the Church, the body is not just an organism, but it is also the temple of God, the residence of divine life. That is why St. Paul says the body is for the Lord. Therefore, this sacrament looks to the body and seeks to give it relief in order that it will not impede the soul in its love of God. And our failure to see this is a failure to see the beauty of the sacrament. I wonder if we really bring to it all the faith that we should have. Did not St. James speak of the great faith that was demanded when the sacrament is received? Here it is the divine physician who comes to us, and we should look less to our disease than we look to him. Of course, the sickness does not preclude the possibility of death, because we are all under the penalty of death. If we are in danger of death, then we receive the sacrament of the dying, which is viaticum. The viaticum is the Eucharist that is given to the dying. Viaticum means on the way you take the Lord with you. If it be God's will that death be not postponed, then we see in the sacrament, because our senses have been cleansed, first an incorporation to the death of Christ. We were baptized in his death. The Eucharist reminded us of his death. And now we are incorporated in a very special way. We say with our Lord on the cross, it is finished. Our death is united to his. We are also united to his resurrection. This sacrament prefigures the anointing of future glory. It in some way applies the resurrection of the body in anticipation. Applies it to our thoughts, to our desires. And we can go before God with all of the avenues of our body cleansed. As I once heard an old woman say, who was dying of cancer of the face, she said, you know, I hate to go before the Lord looking like this. But how beautiful it is to have all the senses cleansed as we go before the Lord. This is a beautiful sacrament. It throws out a bridge between earth and heaven. And over it we walk in our human weakness. The sadness of our suffering is wedded to the yearning for God. Joy and sadness meet. And if you would know what joy this sacrament gives, you would only have to go with us priests into the sick room. And see us as we minister to the dying. Pray that you may never die without this sacrament. I love you. This has been Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For more information about this series, contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. Outside the U.S., call 818-331-3549. And please join us again next time for Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen on EWTN Global Catholic Radio.