← The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
Day 209: Summary of the Anointing of the Sick (2025)
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This summary of the Catechism’s teaching about the Anointing of the Sick is concise and rich. This holy anointing brings us hope and courage as we endure illness and the difficulties of old age. While we pray for healing of body and soul, this sacrament also prepares us for death. Fr. Mike ends this episode by explaining three practices of the Church that help her members prepare for death. Today’s readings are Catechism paragraphs 1526-1532.
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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 sure goodness for us, revealed in Scripture and passed down through 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 and God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. This is day 209. We're reading paragraphs 1526 to 1532. Little mini nugget day. I'm also, well, I'm also using the Ascension edition. I don't know if you knew this the Ascension Edition of the Catechism, which includes a 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 Catechism in a Year reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com ciy and lastly, you can click follow or subscribe to your daily podcast app or daily. You know, wherever you listen to this, I know that you're tired of hearing that. I also know you probably already have your Catechism in your reading plan. I also, I further know that maybe you are following along with your own Ascension Edition of the Catechism or whichever edition you have. But, you know, maybe someone decided to start at day 209. I don't know. Maybe they decided to start on Nugget Day. I have no idea. But I do know this. I am really impressed. I am genuinely, genuinely grateful for every person who's reached out and said, hey, I'm doing the Catechism in the air. And I always say, how's it going? And almost without fail, people will say things along the lines of it's kind of a little bit of a battle, a little bit of a struggle. At the same time, by the time you reach day 209 today, my guess is you have a rhythm. That's one of those things like, okay, here's where I get it in. Here's when I listen to the Catechism. Hopefully you're getting something out of this. As I said, today is nugget day. So we're going to hear this last section on on the sacrament of the anointing of the sick. Tomorrow we're starting out the sacraments of at the service of Communion, AKA Holy Orders and holy matrimony. But today it's an in brief day. It's a nugget day. And so you know what's going to happen. We're going to hear this review, the nuggets, the bullet points of the most important things that we covered over the last couple of days. So as we get started, let's launch into this. I'm grateful, as I said, for you guys keeping on, keeping on hitting play every single day. And I'm going to stop rhyming right now. So let's say a prayer. Father in heaven, we give you praise and glory in the name of your Son Jesus Christ. We ask you to please come and meet us in our need. Come and be with us in this moment. Fill our breath, our lungs, with your Holy Spirit. Fill us with your Holy Spirit. Fill our minds with your truth, with your clarity, with your goodness. Help us to say yes to you this moment and every moment of our lives. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. It is day 209. We're reading paragraphs 1526 to 1532. In brief, the letter of James chapter five states, is any among you sick, let him call for the presbyters 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 sins, he will be forgiven. James 5:14 15 the sacrament of anointing of the sick has at its purpose the conferral of a special grace on the Christian experiencing the difficulties inherent in the condition of grave illness or old age. The proper time for receiving this holy anointing has certainly arrived when the believer begins to be in danger of death because of illness or old age. Each time a Christian falls seriously ill, he may receive the anointing of the sick and also when, after he has received it, the illness worsens. Only priests, presbyters, and bishops can give the sacrament of the anointing of the sick using oil blessed by the bishop or, if necessary, by the celebrating presbyter himself. The celebration of the anointing of the sick consists essentially in the anointing of the forehead and hands of the sick person in the Roman rite or of other parts of the body in the Eastern rite, the anointing being accompanied by the liturgical prayer of the celebrant asking for the special grace of this sacrament. The special grace of the sacrament of the anointing of the sick has as its effects the uniting of the sick person to the passion of Christ for his own good and that of the whole church. The strengthening peace and courage to endure in a Christian manner the sufferings of illness or old age, the forgiveness of sins if the sick person was not able to obtain it through the sacrament of penance, the restoration of health if it is conducive to the salvation of his soul, the preparation for passing over to eternal life. Right there we are, Nuggets 1526 to Nugget 1532. Very brief, very, very in brief today. And yet once, just like yesterday, just like the last few days have been, this is, I think this is truly an invitation for us to reflect on our own death. In fact, so much of our life gets to be a practice for death. What I mean by that is it doesn't say it here in this in brief, but there is a sense of. I mentioned yesterday that we don't necessarily think about death. We don't necessarily think about the death of the people around us. I mean, immediately around us. We might hear about people far from us, we might hear about acquaintances. But I think we typically. And this might not be you, but we typically avoid reflecting. Like really doing deep thinking, not worrying. That's a whole different thing. Reflecting and worrying are not the same thing. You might say, oh, I think about death all the time. I'm scared of it. I worry about it all the time. I worry about the death of my loved ones, the death of my family members. Okay, that's not the same thing as reflecting. And what I mean by that is praying, meditating on your own death. You know, there is a preparation for death that the Church gives us every week. In fact, there's a preparation for death we could do every, every, every day. Here's three ways I think the Church invites us to prepare for death. Number one is the Church invites us to make an examination of conscience every single day that at some point, or what, what Saint Ignatius of Loyola called the consciousness examen. So a lot of the Jesuits will do this. In fact, it's a part of their spiritual life, is to make a consciousness examine. But at the end of your day, you go over the day and say, where was God in my day? Actually you ask the Holy Spirit first and say, okay, Holy Spirit, come to help me and give me guidance in this. And then where was God in this day? Where were his offerings of grace? And where did I say yes to that? So you go over those blessings of the day and then you thank God for that. Then you go back over the day and go through and say, okay, now where was God inviting me to Say yes to something or say no to something, but. And I didn't say yes or I didn't say no. So where did I fail to see God today? And we would go over those, those moments too, and then repent of those, and then make a resolution to renew that, that yes to the Lord and those no's to sin on a regular basis the next day. So this consciousness examine is so helpful for us in a prayer as a preparation for death. Because I actually get a pulse on, okay, am I consistently saying yes to God, or am I dismissing God? Am I indifferent to God? Am I ignoring God, or am I rejecting God? See, I think so often we can think, oh no, I think I'm probably choosing God. Like I'm most likely saying yes to God for the most part. But then if we just stop on a regular basis, I don't mean stop every single moment, every single minute, but at the end of that day to go back and Ignatius will say, you don't have to do it at the, only at the end of the day, actually. In fact, I think a lot of Jesuits will do it more than once in the course of a day. You can do it in the middle of the day. But at some point in our day, do we stop and just ask the question, am I actively saying yes to God? Am I more or less indifferent to God or am I rejecting God? Say, you're on your way to work right now. Maybe you're making a drive somewhere, okay, this morning, was I actively saying yes to God in all of this? Was I indifferent to God in any of this? Was I saying no to God in any of this? I think sometimes we get to the end of the day and think, oh no, I wasn't rejecting God. I wasn't necessarily choosing a bunch of sin all day. I also don't think I was intentionally saying yes to God all day. I guess he was kind of just not there. He was kind of absent from my day. And we know this, right? We know that God is always everywhere. He is omnipresent. So he wasn't really absent from your day. He was just absent from your, from your thoughts, your choices, your heart. And I don't mean to be saying it like that, like accusatory. That's all of us, right? That's. We get to the end of our days and we say, okay, God, no, I wasn't rejecting you. I wasn't rebelling against you. I was maybe even doing, here's my life as a priest. Like, I was even doing, like, you know, Church things. But was God himself present to me, or was I just talking about him? I mean, that's one of the things we get to do at the end of our lives, is we realize, wow, okay, I had all of this time. I had 10 years, I had 20 years, I had 70 years. Was I intentionally saying yes to God for those that time? Was I rebelling against him, rejecting him? Or was I just kind of indifferent towards him? That's. That's one thing. Okay, so the consciousness examine. The second thing the church gives us every week is that's every day consciousness examine. Every week, the church gives us Fridays. Fridays are a day of penance. And church gives us every year, Lent, and so I'll. Or even Advent as a penitential season. I would look at those two things. Fridays during any time of the year, or the season of Lent, the season of Advent. I think those days and those seasons are also times to prepare ourselves for debt. There are times where we say, okay, what am I bound by? Like, in the sense of, where am I not free? Where am I? Remember we talked about how sins can leave us attached to sins or some habits can be developed because we just kind of are drifting through life and we realize, wow, I really need. I have a maybe an inordinate need for coffee. Maybe I need to give up coffee on Fridays or have an inordinate reliance on that drink at the end of the day. Like, maybe I need to give up that drink at the end of the day for Friday or for Lent or for Advent. I have an inordinate need for whatever that thing is. Maybe I need to give that thing up at least one day a week. Maybe give that thing up for Lent, for Advent, because God wants my freedom, and I can't go to heaven if I'm holding onto this too tightly. It doesn't have to be a sin, but I have to be willing and able to be able to let go of stuff. And so the church gives us this opportunity every day with a consciousness examiner, every week with that Friday, that day of penance, and every year in Lent and in Advent, with these seasons where we just practice dying because the church wants us to be ready to die. That's not only why we have these practices, it's also why we have the anointing of the sick. And we recognize that, yes, you can receive the anointing of the sick whenever you fall seriously ill at extreme old age or in danger of death because of that old age or illness, or even after you get anointed, and then your illness worsens, like, yeah, you can get anointed again. It's a great, great gift because as we talked about yesterday, the sacrament of the anointing of the sick gives us these particular graces, uniting us to the passion of Jesus for our own good and the good of the whole church gives us strength, peace and courage to endure in a Christian way the sufferings of illness or old age. It gives us forgiveness of sins. If we hadn't had the chance to go to reconciliation and sometimes it even heals, we should be incredible. And God does still heal, even today. Above all, I think. I think above all, it gets us prepared for passing over to eternal life on this day. I think this last day of talking about the anointing of the sick before we launch in tomorrow, talking about the sacraments at the service of communion, firstly holy orders and then matrimony. We just get to get to pray for all of those who have gone before us and prepare our own hearts for our own making of this great, incredible journey from this life into eternal life. We just pray. Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and the perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace and rise with Christ. Amen. I am praying for you. Please pray for me. My name is Father Mike. I cannot wait to see you tomorrow. God bless.