Sacramentalized and/or evangelized?

John 3:16 is considered the most beautiful passage in the Holy Bible. It says, “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life.”

The so-called sacramental system in our Church which shows the structure, meaning, regulations, rites and celebrations of the Seven Holy Sacraments. As outward signs they signify and effect what they signify because they are Actions of Christ that confer sanctifying grace. They are therefore actual signs of God’s love. The whole of Christian life rotate around the Seven Sacraments. We can then summarily and rightly say we are sacramentalized. Some reduce it to KBL = kasal, bunyag, lubong (wedding, baptism, burial).

There is always a teaching element in every sacramental rite. It is therefore a form of evangelization but in a minor sense. It is not complete and substantial. But definitely it is also a form of love on the part of Jesus Our Lord.

The new evangelization with the organized evangelizers of bishops, priests and laity, trained in prayer, meditation, discernment, theology, catechesis, Church law, homiletics, teaching, writing, media and communication, and missionary immersion clearly manifest the love of God in Jesus Christ. With modesty aside we proudly proclaim ourselves as a mature Church and the only Christian country in Asia. But can we also say we are evangelized?

I put these two issues of sacramentalization and evangelization in “and/or” because I am not too sure. What makes me think this way is the pervasive and seemingly massive loss of the sense of right and wrong in many of our leaders in society and government where most of them are Catholics and products of our evangelizing schools, parishes and lay ecclesial movements. They now seem unable to say, “wrong is wrong even if everybody is doing it, and right is right even if nobody is doing it.” This is the result of a calloused conscience (nakobalan nga konsiyensia). When the sense of right and wrong is gone, the sense of God is gone too.