Not Withholding Grace

Allow me to begin with an obvious statement: there are three sacraments of initiation. In order, they are Baptism, Confirmation, and the Holy Eucharist. In order, yes. Though there is a permissible practice in many places of reversing the order of the latter two for those children who are being raised in the Catholic faith, this is a historical and theological anomaly, and, in my view, one that the Church would be well served by abandoning.

The original order is already widely known to be the normal practice for those who come into the Church as adults, and some dioceses have already restored it for Catholic children also. There is further precedent for this order in the practice of the Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, which confer all three sacraments of initiation on the same day – and in the same ceremony – to babies.

The primary benefit I see in the original order is that it makes more apparent the reality that Confirmation is a gift we receive, rather than a personal achievement or a “rite of passage,” in the typical sense of that phrase. In the way many Catholics appear to understand it now, Confirmation comes across more like marriage vows – a set of personal promises made by individuals. This is similar to the mainline Protestant concept and practice of Confirmation. One person – sadly, I do not recall who – made the wise remark that this way of seeing Confirmation makes it seem more like “us confirming God,” rather than the reality, which is God confirming us.

Another benefit of an earlier Confirmation age and of having Confirmation come before the first reception of Holy Communion is removing some of the appearance of a graduation from it. Confirmation should not be the end of all formation in the faith, and making sure it does not appear as a graduation guards against it becoming this. Furthermore, despite how ingrained this idea may be in American culture, Confirmation is not “adulthood in the Church.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1308) refutes this, stating that,

Although Confirmation is sometimes called the "sacrament of Christian maturity," we must not confuse adult faith with the adult age of natural growth, nor forget that the baptismal grace is a grace of free, unmerited election and does not need "ratification" to become effective. St. Thomas reminds us of this:

Age of body does not determine age of soul. Even in childhood man can attain spiritual maturity: as the book of Wisdom says: "For old age is not honored for length of time, or measured by number of years." Many children, through the strength of the Holy Spirit they have received, have bravely fought for Christ even to the shedding of their blood.

On the other hand, some have argued that it makes sense to delay Confirmation to an older age so that there is an opportunity to make a decision to receive this sacrament with deeper awareness of the weight of what one is receiving. There is some merit to that argument, but the problem is that if one applies it to Confirmation – the sealing with the gift of the Holy Spirit – but not to the first reception of the Eucharist – the very presence of Jesus himself – it hardly seems like an appropriate order of priority. 

Well then, one might argue, why not delay both of these Sacraments? That was, after all, common practice in the Western Church before Pope Pius X lowered the age of First Communion to where it presently stands. (He did not deal with the question of Confirmation.) However, the problem with doing so is that children would be without the graces of these sacraments as they grow up in a world in which it is not easy to keep the faith. The good news is that there is another side of that coin; perhaps if they received not only one (that is, the Eucharist), but both (that is, Confirmation also) when they first reach the age of reason, we would see fewer of them falling away from the faith in their teenage years. It may even be helpful to adopt the Eastern practice of giving all three sacraments to babies, but at the very least, giving them at the age of reason – the age around which moral decision making typically begins – would be a great gift and service to our youngest members of the body of Christ.

Along these same lines, it is worth noting that a small child receiving Confirmation is more likely than a teenager – considering the noted cynicism of teenagers – to approach the sacrament with a sincere and humble heart, even if with less knowledge. In this way, giving the sacrament earlier guards against sacrilege.

I will end with a story. When I first was getting to know the woman to whom I am now engaged to be married, she – who had received the sacraments of initiation in the original order herself as as a child – condensed all the arguments I had ever heard or made for the original order into one striking line: “Why would you hold back graces?” She endured exceptional hardships in her childhood, and I shudder to think where she would be today had she not been given the great gift of the Holy Spirit in Confirmation so early in her life. Now we pray that we will be granted the gift of children, and that the graces which were not withheld from her would also not be withheld from our children.