THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE SACRAMENTS

The sacraments often seem anachronistic today, holdovers from a time of intellectual naivete, mere symbols in an age which demands reality above all else. Father Bro sets out to answer such difficulties by demonstrating that sacramental spirituality is preeminently a spirituality for today. His method is to establish the essence of the sacraments as contained in Scripture, to describe the traditional sacramental practice of the Church in liturgy and in theology, and finally to show how the sacraments fulfill the needs of modern man in that they help him really to encounter God on the personal level. Bro, however, is a Thomist, and his thought, though soundly effective, is cast in an idiom of piety -- one might almost say of ""scholarly gentleness"" -- that the contemporary Catholic will be tempted to reject as milk offered in the place of meat. It is, in short, a pious book at a time when piety is suspect and, just as important from another viewpoint, uncommercial.