Search results
of the Supper of the Lord in its sale and application for others (i.e. offering masses for other people). Here the entire theory of Sacrifice was set forth and the use of the Sacraments was shown. And when pious men in the Monasteries now heard that they must flee from Idols, they began to depart from their impious servitude. Therefore Luther added to the explanation of the doctrines on penance, the remission of sins, faith, and indulgences, also these topics: the difference between divine and human laws, the doctrine on the use of the Supper of the Lord and the other
immanence of Christ’s humanity, in devotional objects such as the crucifix and, especially, in the relic of MUP_McDonald_02_Ch1 29 11/18/03, 16:57 30 Suzanne Conklin Akbari Christ par excellence: that is, the eucharistic host. In this context, it is striking to note the resemblance of the behaviour of the crucifix in the Siege of Melayne to that of the host in the fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament: like the crucifix in the earlier poem, the eucharist in the drama moves from being victim to tormentor. When the unscrupulous Jew Jonathas stabs the
mass support given to Jansenists in the 1720s made any general attempt to enforce Unigenitus potentially very dangerous. But in the 1730s zealous orthodox clerics took the initiative and began a determined campaign of sacrament refusal to those accused of Jansenism. Although the refusal of sacraments was already an established weapon in the orthodox battle against Jansenism, in the politicoreligious hothouse that was eighteenth-century Paris many less religious Jansenists viewed it as one more facet of heartless Bourbon despotism. The denial of one sacrament, however
third of principalities, archangels and angels. The three triads of the ecclesiastical hierarchy consisted of ‘the operations of the sacraments, the godlike dispensers of the sacred things and those guided by them (the dispensers) . . . towards the sacred’. The highest division housed baptism, the eucharist and unction while the third held monastic orders, initiates (or holy people) and catechumens (those not yet admitted to the sacraments). Most importantly for our purpose, Bérulle placed hierarchs or bishops, priests and deacons in the middle triad.14 Figure 1
three Christians who had stood watch over the Sacrament on the night of Holy Thursday. He told the Inquisitor: At night between Holy Thursday and Friday, I was keeping vigil at the Holy Sacrament, which was in the ‘tomb’, and I heard the Jews, who were in the house of Davide, the banker, at about 4 or 5 hours of the night, making deafening noises and shouting, singing festively, in the same way as our priests do, when they sing Vespers or the other offices.49 First a few people sang and then the others joined in, first one group singing and then the other. And while
they enticed the faithful away from the parishes, leaving the curés short of both income and pastoral work. The French church had become a centre for the debate when the Franciscans had begun to argue that the mendicant orders possessed greater mandates to preach and administer the sacraments than the parish clergy. In 1409, the Franciscan pope, Alexander V, even issued a bull (Regnans in excelsis), affirming that the regulars held privileges to perform these services.3 As the religious orders underwent their rapid revival during the Catholic Reformation, this old
Commissary, and also an Inquisitor of heretical depravity, and was fierce in his intellect and strong in his body, when he saw these Propositions, he bore Luther’s outrageous audacity badly, and in order that equal might answer to equal he published 106 theses, in which he explained the contrary opinion. For example, Luther began as follows: ‘Our Lord and Teacher Jesus Christ, by saying “Make your repentance, etc.,” wished the whole life of a believer to be one of penance. That cannot be understood as concerning the penitential Sacrament of Confession and Reparation, which
kaluger curses this object, and it then has to be placed in the garden or around the threshold of the future victim, from where it can exert its evil effect. In a quite serious and mortal version of this, the curse is pronounced upon some earth taken from the graves of nine dead people. The devices of black magic, also used in individual maleficium , thus become a kind of negative version of the church sacraments: ‘religious
interpretations of the issue could be supported and further developed in the Council’s wake, because no official doctrine existed. Once more, the quarrel reared its head when the Tridentine delegates turned to formulating the decrees on the sacrament of order between October 1562 and July 1563. After a replay of the divisions over episcopal residence, the Council finally decreed that the priestly orders ‘truly and properly’ formed one of the seven sacraments, imprinting a unique and ineffaceable character on its recipients which enabled them to consecrate the bread and wine and
Malleus, on the other hand, use notions of superstition to validate and authorize the conceptual horizons of their informants, and to defend a broad range of popular “magical” procedures by fixing a narrow limit upon those practices that were not allowed. To begin with, Institoris and Sprenger maintained that sacramentals provided the most consistently reliable protection against witchcraft. Strictly speaking, sacramentals are blessed objects – commonly water, salt, wax, and herbs – conducive to divine grace and inimical to the devil.116 Unlike true sacraments, they