As I was working on this chapter, I heard a report on National Public Radio about elections in Lebanon, which quoted an unnamed Western diplomat: “If you think you understand Lebanese politics, it obviously hasn’t been explained to you properly.” Many people feel that something similar could be said about the sacrament of confirmation. Explaining it properly is no simple task, and the explanation may still leave us with less than a full understanding of this sacrament.One short statement from the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, however, provides us the key to understanding confirmation: “The rite of confirmation is to be revised also so that the intimate connection of this sacrament with the whole of Christian initiation may be shown more clearly” (no.71).
This sacrament has had a difficult life. Through the centuries people in the church have used it to serve many different needs. These uses are so different from one another that it is easy to understand why the meaning of this sacrament is a conundrum for many people today.Picking up different books and listening to different speakers describe this sacrament makes one wonder if they are all talking about the same sacrament. Some people see confirmation as a “sacrament of Christian maturity.” Others see it as simply the completion of baptism. Some stress the Christian commitment the sacrament requires. Others emphasize the free gift of the Holy Spirit. Some argue that it must be celebrated only in late teen or early adult years; still others contend that it is best celebrated with baptism, even in infancy. For some people it is the beginning of a lifetime of Christian living; for others it is the final capstone of parish religious education. Some say it makes Christians into soldiers of Christ; others, into missionaries of the Gospel; still others, into servants of the world.
And different writers combine several of these, giving them varying degrees of importance Paul Turner, in his excellent study entitled Confirmation: The Baby in Solomon’s Court (Paulist Press, 1993), has described no fewer than seven different ritual patterns in use in various churches today, all called confirmation. He sees these seven as deriving ultimately from three different models in antiquity: the completion of the rite of baptism, the reconciliation of heretics baptismal anointing deferred until some time after baptism.
A look at church history reveals the context for these three ancient roots of confirmation. Evidence from the early days of the church is very limited. Scripture scholars tell us that despite various hints about the role of the Holy Spirit in the lives of Christians, the New Testament gives us no real evidence for any rite that we would recognize as confirmation. For several centuries after the New Testament period, Christians would have been very puzzled if we had asked them about the sacrament of confirmation. What we have come to know as a separate sacrament was for them simply a part of the rite of baptism, the celebration of initiation by which a person became a Christian.
The celebration of initiation varied from place to place and from time to time,so it would take a large book to describe it in detail in all its variations in these centuries. Instead, we will examine here a typical outline of elements that can give us a sense of the experience. Such a rite, normally celebrated at the Easter Vigil, would begin with the candidates for initiation leaving the assembly of the faithful to go to the baptistery, often a separate building near the entrance to the church. Once there, they would renounce Satan, perhaps facing the west and spitting at him; then facing the east, they would commit themselves to Christ.
At this point the candidates would return to the full assembly, where the bishop was waiting with the faithful. Greeted with acclamations, they would then be anointed with chrism by the bishop and greeted with the kiss of peace. Now members of the faithful, they would join the full assembly for the celebration of the Easter Eucharist. This anointing by the bishop after the baptismal bath is the ancient root of what we know as confirmation.As this description of initiation suggests, this anointing was a brief part of a much larger rite.
As long as dioceses were small and the bishop always presided at Easter initiations, there was no problem. But when that was no longer possible due to the increasing size of the church, the question arose about what to do with that portion of initiation when the bishop was not present. In the East the decision was made that whoever presided at the Easter rites would do the anointing. Thus among Eastern churches, the anointing or chrismation is, to this day, celebrated immediately after the water bath of baptism, whether the initiate is an adult or an infant.
As this happened, First Communion was often also delayed, since it was properly received only after confirmation. At the beginning of the 20th century, Pope Pius X lowered the age for First Communion to seven to encourage more frequent Communion, and confirmation was left hanging, as it were, in midair, now fully removed from the initiation celebration in most people’s minds.So the first of Turner’s historical models was an anointing that was clearly part of baptism. The deferral of that anointing until later, eventually many years after baptism, is seen as a separate model because it lost its roots in initiation and came to be seen as a sacrament of Christian maturity.
Explain why we sometimes call confirmation a sacrament with a confused theology. Include historical and theological reasons to support your answer. In spite of the confusion, describe at least one way in which the sacrament’s theology can be understood and celebrated coherently?
