Virtue scores
Review
Published by TAN Books, Grace and the Sacraments takes up one of the most practically urgent questions in Catholic life: what exactly happens when a person receives a sacrament, and why does it sometimes seem to change nothing? The book's organizing concern is the relationship between grace — freely given, ontologically real, not earned — and the seven sacraments Christ instituted as its ordinary channels. TAN Books has long served readers who want rigorous Catholic doctrine without academic scaffolding, and this title sits in that tradition: it is written for the serious lay Catholic, the catechist, the person in spiritual direction who wants more than a devotional reassurance that sacraments "matter." The reader who comes away from this book will understand why the Church insists on both the objective power of sacramental grace and the genuine importance of interior disposition, and will have a framework for thinking about why the same sacrament can produce radically different fruit in different lives. SECTION TWO **Created:** The book's account of grace builds on the Catholic conviction that human beings are made capable of receiving divine life — that the soul, by its nature, has an orientation toward God that grace does not impose from outside but fulfills from within. This is not a pious add-on but a claim about what the person fundamentally is: a being whose deepest structure is ordered toward communion with God, and for whom the sacraments are therefore not external impositions but the completion of an original design. **Fallen:** Grace and the Sacraments takes the wounded condition of the person seriously by treating the question of sacramental fruitfulness as genuinely distinct from the question of sacramental validity. A person can receive a valid sacrament and experience little transformation — not because the grace was absent, but because concupiscence, disordered attachment, or a lack of interior preparation placed an obstacle. This gap between what the sacrament objectively confers and what a soul actually receives is precisely where the book locates the Fallen condition: grace flows, but it meets a subject whose receptivity is shaped by sin's residue. **Redeemed:** The Redeemed state is the book's destination. Grace here is treated not as a static quantity deposited in the soul but as a dynamic participation in the life of Christ — what Aquinas identified as a participated likeness to the divine nature. The sacraments, in this account, are not remedies for deficiency alone; they are the ordinary means by which a person's transformation into Christ's likeness advances. Purgation and mortification appear as removal of obstacles, while the sacraments themselves provide the positive impetus of that growth. **Justice (worship and devotion):** The book trains the virtue of religion in its readers by explaining the inner logic of sacramental worship — why it is not reducible to communal ritual or subjective feeling but is the objective response of a creature to the Creator who has drawn near. A reader who understands this account of the sacraments will approach Mass, Confession, and Anointing differently: not as occasions to feel something, but as encounters with a power that acts whether or not the emotions cooperate. **Prudence (docility):** The book invites a particular kind of intellectual humility in its readers — a willingness to let the Church's teaching correct popular misunderstandings about what the sacraments do and don't guarantee. That is docility in the Thomistic sense: openness to learning from a tradition whose understanding exceeds one's own. SECTION THREE Jordan Aumann1 in Spiritual Theology describes the sacraments as "the most efficacious" of the three principal means of grace because they act objectively, independent of the holiness of the minister or the recipient, and places them above even meritorious works and prayer in the order of sanctifying power — a hierarchy that Grace and the Sacraments almost certainly elaborates and defends. Antonio Royo Marín2 in Teología de la perfección cristiana confirms the same doctrinal ground, citing Trent's anathema against those who would reduce sacramental grace to the believer's faith alone, and treating the ordinary increase of grace through the sacraments as a truth of faith rather than a theological opinion. Where both Aumann and Royo Marín focus primarily on the objective side of that efficacy, the DMU pastoral care document on the sacraments3 supplies the corrective that Grace and the Sacraments likely needs as a conversation partner: it observes that "the issue of sacramental validity has become abstracted from actual human experience," and that the question of fruitfulness — what the sacrament actually does in the life of a real, historically situated person — has not received the attention it deserves in post-Tridentine theology. Read together, these three sources form the full arc this book navigates. ## References [^1]: Aumann, J. (1980). *Spiritual theology*. Christian Classics. (sacraments as principal means of grace, ex opere operato efficacy section) [^2]: Royo Marin, A. (n.d.). *Teologia de la perfeccion cristiana*. [Publisher not specified in source]. (sacramentos, ex opere operato, citation of Council of Trent D 351) [^3]: [DMU faculty paper]. (n.d.). *New model of pastoral care and the sacraments*. (p. 1, on sacramental validity abstracted from human experience)
✓ Strengths
- ✓Situates the sacraments as the primary instruments through which divine grace enters human life, treating them not as ritual formalities but as living encounters with Christ's redemptive action.
- ✓Engages the classical ex opere operato doctrine honestly, which corrects a common pastoral confusion between the objective efficacy of sacramental grace and the subjective dispositions that allow that grace to bear fruit.
- ✓Addresses the unity of the human person by taking seriously the question of fruitfulness — how grace lands in a real, historically wounded person — rather than treating sacramental validity as a purely metaphysical abstraction.
- ✓Rooted in TAN Books' tradition of presenting perennial Catholic teaching accessibly, making this a suitable formation resource for laity, catechists, and those in spiritual direction.
- ✓The treatment of grace as a dynamic, positive reality — not merely the absence of sin — corresponds to Aquinas's account of grace as participated likeness to the divine nature, giving the reader a theologically coherent framework for understanding spiritual growth.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The title's focus on grace and sacraments may treat the question of fruitfulness (ex opere operantis) more briefly than the question of validity, a tendency noted broadly in post-Tridentine sacramental theology that a careful reader should watch for.