← The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
Day 206: Healing the Sick (2026)
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By taking up our cross and following Christ, we gain a new way of seeing sickness and frailty. Along with this newness of vision, the Church is given the command from her founder to heal the sick. Since its beginning, the Church has anointed the sick among us, praying for their healing and salvation. Amid their sufferings, the suffering can endure, uniting themselves to Christ’s own afflictions for the sake of the Church. Today’s readings are Catechism paragraphs 1506-1513.
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Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us revealed in Scripture and passed down to the tradition of the Catholic faith. The Catechism in a Year is brought to you by ascension. In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, discovering our identity in God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. This is day 206, reading paragraphs 1506 to 1513. As always, I am using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes the Foundations of Faith approach. But you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your own I'm going fast this morning. Wow. You can also download your own Catechism in a Year reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com ciy and you can click follow or subscribe in your podcast app for daily updates and daily notifications. Today is day 206. We're reading paragraphs 1506 to 1513. Yesterday we talked about illness and human life and the sick person before God, how Jesus Christ is the physician. And also today we're moving on that Jesus invites his disciples to follow him by taking up their cross in their turn. But also Jesus gives out in the Holy Spirit a special charism of healing. One of the reasons for healing the miracles, the mighty works, would often accompany the proclamation of the gospel. That if someone comes along and says, you know, we talked about this before many times, if Jesus himself comes along and says, I'm God, people would say, well, okay, well before I believe you, you need to prove it. So the healings are not only a sign of God's love and care for the poor, care for the sick, they're also signs that he is who he says he is. Similarly, he sends out his apostles, right? Sends out his disciples and tells them to heal as well. Not only as a sign of his love and a sign of his care for all the people, but also as a sign that the message, the message of the Gospel is true. And so that's going to be one of the signs. And then we're going to talk today about the sacrament of the sick. And how actually does the sacrament of the anointing of the sick actually get played out? How I say played out? You know what I'm saying? How about how the sacrament of the anointing of the sick, of the sick gets prayed out? Haha. See what I Did there. So let's, in order to enter into the reading for today, paragraphs 1506, 1513. Let us call upon our Heavenly Father in the name of Jesus Christ and pray in the power of the Holy Spirit as we pray. Father in heaven, we love you and we know without a doubt that you love us. We know that whether you heal us or whether you are just present to us in the midst of our pain, midst of our suffering, we know that you love us, Lord God, for all the moments when it's difficult, difficult to acknowledge this, difficult to accept your love as it is difficult to accept your will. Lord God, as often as it is hard to to not be healed, we ask that you please come and meet us with your strength and meet us with your grace. Help our hearts not to become hardened to you, but help our hearts to continue to melt in your presence. Help us always to trust you and help us to never stay afar from you, especially when we need you the most in our in our woundedness, in our wickedness, in our suffering and in our sickness. Be with us this day and every day. Help us choose you this day and every day. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. This is day 206. We're reading paragraphs 1506 to 1513. Heal the sick Christ invites his disciples to follow him by taking up their cross in their turn. By following him, they acquire a new outlook on illness and the sick. Jesus associates them with his own life of poverty and service. He makes them share in his ministry of compassion and healing. So they went out and preached that men should repent. And they cast out many demons and anointed with oil many that were sick and healed them. The Risen Lord renews this mission, saying, in my name they will lay their hands on the sick and they will recover, and confirms it through the signs that the Church performs by invoking his name. These signs demonstrate in a special way that Jesus is truly God, who saves the Holy Spirit, gives to some a special charism of healing so as to make manifest the power of the grace of the risen Lord. But even the most intense prayers do not always obtain the healing of all illnesses. Thus St. Paul must learn from the Lord that my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness, and that the sufferings to be endured can mean that in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions. For the sake of his body, that is the Church, heal the sick, the Church has received this charge from the Lord and strives to carry it out by taking care of the sick as well as by accompanying them with her prayer of intercession. She believes in the life giving presence of Christ, the physician of souls and bodies. This presence is particularly active through the sacraments and in an altogether special way through the Eucharist, the bread that gives eternal life and that, St. Paul suggests is connected with bodily health. However, the Apostolic Church has its own right for the sick, attested to by St. James who is any among you sick, let him call for the elders of the Church and let them pray over him. Anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up and if he has committed any sins he will be forgiven. Tradition has recognized in this rite one of the seven a sacrament of the sick. The Church believes and confesses that among the seven sacraments there is one especially intended to strengthen those who are being tried by illness. The Anointing of the sick. The Council of Trent stated this sacred anointing of the sick was instituted by Christ our Lord as a true and proper sacrament of the New Testament. It is alluded to indeed by Mark, but is recommended to the faithful and promulgated by James the Apostle and brother of the Lord. From ancient times, in the liturgical traditions of both east and west, we have testimonies to the practice of anointings of the sick with blessed oil. Over the centuries, the anointing of the sick was conferred more and more exclusively on those at the point of death. Because of this, it received the name extreme Unction. Notwithstanding this evolution, the liturgy has never failed to beg the Lord that the sick person may recover his health if it would be conducive to his salvation. The apostolic Constitution Sacrum Unctionem Infirmorum, following upon the Second Vatican Council, established that henceforth in the Roman Rite the following should be the sacrament of anointing of the sick is given to those who are seriously ill by anointing them on the forehead and hands with duly blessed oil pressed from olives or from other plants, saying only once, through this holy anointing, may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit. May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up right. There we have it. Day 206 paragraphs 1506 to 1513 there are so many things just to highlight today, not only here's the context or here's the content of the the Sacrament of Anointing of the sick, that very end, where. We'll talk about that in a second. But just at the very beginning, what happens? Jesus Christ, 1506, invites his disciples to follow him by taking up their cross in turn. Now, this is. Jesus has recast the vision. We talked about this yesterday, but Jesus has recast the vision for. For the role of illness, the role of sickness. Now, I remember talking with a man years ago, and he's a good man, really good man. He was going through a lot of problems, though he wasn't Catholic at the time. And he was experiencing a lot of, I guess, physical and emotional, some mental illness, all these things. And he was struggling because he was saying, okay, so I know the reasons for illness. I know that God uses illness to correct us, right? God uses illness to give us wisdom. He gives us illness to help us grow in maturity. So God gives us illness and. And he allows us to experience these things as a correction, right? I'm living the wrong way. And so God allows me to kind of get what I've chosen in this life. So I don't get what I've chosen in the next life. See, it allows me to experience the consequences of sin, like, you know, suffering so that I can wake up and change my life. Another one is because he wants to mature us, right? God wants to grow us in this understanding. He wants to grow us in patience, wants to grow us in grace. And the third reason that God wants to soften our hearts, right? He wants to give us. Make us more compassionate, more patient with others. Like, these are some things. And so he was sharing with me that he's like, well, you know, I'm looking at my life and there's. There's no real big change. I can see God, you know, I'm not. I'm not living out of his will that I know of at least. And he said, the next thing is, I. I think I'm growing in this maturity. I'm trusting him more. And also I'm growing in compassion for the sufferings of others. So there's no other thing that God can do or wants to do in this. And coming from a Catholic perspective, I was able to point out that, you know, Jesus does give a fourth, essentially a fourth reason, as it were, for suffering that he allows us to experience illness. And that is because it's redemptive, that we recognize that sometimes God doesn't take away the pain, doesn't take away the sin. And even St. Paul talks about this, right? It's in paragraph 15 oh, 8. It says that St. Paul must learn. Remember St. Paul, he begged the Lord, he said, how many times? Three times I came before the Lord and I begged him to take this thorn in my side away from me. And we don't know what that thorn in his side was, but he begged the Lord to do it. And instead he didn't get the healing he wanted, but he got the response from the Lord who said, my grace is sufficient for you, My grace is enough for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Even more, we recognize that St. Paul goes on to teach not only the Colossians, but also all of us. He says, in my flesh, I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is the Church. Think about that. In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's sufferings for the sake of his body, the Church. Now, John Paul ii, years ago, he wrote an encyclical called Salvifici Dolores, which is on human suffering. And he asked the question, wait a second. So what's lacking in Christ's affliction? So like what is lacking in the sufferings of Jesus? I don't know if you've ever thought, if you've ever come across this Colossians, chapter 1, verse 24, where St. Paul says, in my flesh I complete what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ. So what's lacking in the sufferings of Christ? What's lacking in Christ's afflictions? And the answer John Paul gives is nothing. Nothing. And this is. Jeff Cavins taught me this. He introduced me to Salvifici Dolores, where John Paul teaches this. What's lacking the sufferings of Christ? Nothing. Because John Paul goes on to say, though I'm paraphrasing, he says, but so that you and I might participate in the mystery of Christ's redemptive work of this world, he extends to us a sliver of his cross so that you and I can be co workers. We can participate with Jesus in the salvation and redemption of the world. So in my flesh, in your flesh, in our sufferings, we complete what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ. What's lacking? Nothing. But Jesus Christ, because he wants to. Wants us to not only participate, he doesn't just want us to share in his glory, he also wants us to share in his affliction. He doesn't just want us to share in his resurrection, he wants us to share in his crucifixion. Why? Because he knows that not only, I mean why is the big, big question. And the answer is mystery. But there's many things that happen to us as we carry that cross. Maybe the most important is at the heart of it, we become more like him who didn't avoid his cross. He didn't run away from his cross, but he embraced his cross out of love for his Father and love for us. And so we get to do that. When we embrace our cross with the heart of Jesus, our heart becomes more like Him. When we embrace it out of love for the Father, out of love for our fellow man, we become like him. And that's the entire. That's the entire point. Yes. God has extended his grace to heal to the apostles and to the disciples and to Christians. Now, there are some people a charism of healing. Some people have a charism of healing. That happens right now. I don't know if you know this. God still heals today. There are people that God. Oh, man. I've come into contact with people who have done this, people who have been healed, people who have been given that gift of the ministry of healing. It's amazing. But not everyone gets healed. Everyone does have the opportunity, though, to unite our sufferings to Jesus. And sometimes again, why does God allow this to happen? Well, there's a bunch of reasons. And one of those reasons is, as I said, the redemptive suffering. And there's the correction, there's the maturity, there's the softening of our hearts. I think there's something about all of this that my good pal CS Lewis, he had written about this in the book the problem of pain. C.S. lewis wrote three books on the mystery of suffering, the Mystery of evil in the World. One was an essay. He approached this from three different perspectives. One is intellectually. The other is kind of imaginatively. And the third is just gut punch, emotionally. And the intellectual approach was the Problem of Pain. This essay, just breaking it down and saying, what is this? How do we understand this intellectually? The imaginative presentation of the problem of pain or the mystery of evil and how God can use it redemptively is in a book called Till we have Faces. It's a novel. It's fiction. It's probably one of my favorite novels of all time, Till we have Faces. And the third book, the one that processes grief, processes suffering on a gut level, is his personal journal called A Grief Observed that he kept after his wife Joy had died. And that one is just. It's just. It's just really raw. It's like, again, it's a gut punch, but when C.S. lewis was writing the Problem of Pain, he has this quote, and the quote is. I think it's just. It's fascinating and might help us today before we move on to the heart of the anointing of the sick. He says this. He says we can ignore even pleasure, but pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. No doubt, pain as God's megaphone, is a terrible instrument. It may lead to final and unrepentant rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man may have for amendment. It removes the veil. It plants the flag of truth within the fortress of the rebel soul. We talked about this yesterday, how pain, suffering, illness. It reminds us that we're finite. It reminds us that we're limited. It reminds us that this life will not go on forever. And sometimes that's God's megaphone to rouse a drowsy and deaf world. Now the church does come and meet the sick. We want the church. We want the sick to not know that they're abandoned. And so, as I mentioned yesterday, too, the letter of St. James, chapter five. There's the heart of the sacrament of Anointing of The Sick, where St. James writes, this is the Bible. It says, are any among you sick, let them call for the elders or presbyters of the church. Let them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up. If he committed any sins, he will be forgiven. And that's one of the seven sacraments. And so what is this? It's a true and proper sacrament. This is. Remember, Jesus would reach out and touch the sick. He would. He would come into contact with the sick. And this is one of the ways Jesus extends his healing. He extends his healing ministry, where he reaches out through the body of Christ and touches the sick through the anointing of the sick. And so we have this, as it says, extreme unction. And what happens? It's given to those who are seriously ill. We'll talk about that tomorrow. They were given to those who are seriously ill by anointing them with the forehead. On the forehead and the hands with blessed oil, saying, only once, through this holy anointing, may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit. May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up. You know, this is such an incredible Incredible grace. If you've received the anointing of the sick, it is a gift to you. If you've been there when your loved one has received the anointing of the sick, it is so, so consoling and such a blessing. And I am so grateful to the Lord, not only for all the times that people I love have received the anointing of the sick, particularly at the hour of death, just so grateful to the Lord, but also grateful that the Lord has called me to be a priest and has given me the ability to be there for many people. And I, you know, my role as a, as a college chaplain. I don't do the anointing of the sick as often as some of my brother priests do. But those men who just will, in the middle of the night, at any time of the day, will just leave their warm beds and go through the darkness, go through the night, go through the cold to be at the bedside of any sick person. I'm so, I'm so humbled by my brother priests who constantly and just with, with no regard for self, they show up. It's amazing. If you ever received that sacrament of anointing of the sick or someone you love in the middle of the night or in the most weird time, I'm just so grateful, right? Our priests, I'm so grateful I'm not one of them. I only occasionally get to do the anointing of the sick. It's a grace every time. I am in awe. I am in awe. And I am humbled by my brothers who are, will continually show up. And so let's pray for them. Honestly. Let's pray for those priests who get called on day or night and pray for all those who are sick, especially those who suffer alone and just know that I'm praying for you. Please pray for me. My name is Father Mike. I cannot wait to see you tomorrow. God bless Sam.