Untitled - Rore Sanctifica

Ritualism in its relation to Re-union. 275
I must commence by stating that I intend,
In what follows, to use the word "Ritual" in the
widest possible sense which the term will fairly
bear. I mean to employ it so as to include
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almost everything in Christianity and the
Catholic Church which does not come under
the head of doctrine, or, as everyone, since
the publication of Dr. Newman s Apologia,
"
seems to prefer to call it, dogma." Looking,
then, upon dogma as, in a sense, the soul of the
Catholic Church, I would call Ritual her bones
and sinews and flesh. And no more than man
can exist as a visible being in this world without
his body, can the visible Catholic Church, Mili
tant here in earth, exist without her Ritual.
The next step is to distinguish between that
Ritual which is absolutely essential in, I do not
say to, the Catholic Church, and that which is
essential to the unity of the Catholic Church.
Every one knows that the absolutely essential
points of Ritual are, comparatively speaking,
extremely few. They may be almost all in-
cluded in the matter of all the sacraments, with,
in two or three, the addition of an unvarying
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and invariable form. And even as to the
matter of some of the sacraments, there have
been differences of opinion amongst theologians
as to what it was, though all are agreed that the
materia propria of each sacrament must exist,
or else, sacramentum non conficitur.
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