Efficacy
Blessings are not sacraments; they are not of Divine institution; they do not confer sanctifying grace; and they do not produce their effects in virtue of the rite itself. They are sacramentals and, as such, they are held to produce the following specific effects:
- Excitation of pious emotions and affections of the heart and, by means of these, remission of venial sin and of the temporal punishment due to it
- Freedom from power of evil spirits
- Preservation and restoration of bodily health
- Various other benefits, temporal or spiritual
All these effects are not necessarily inherent in any one blessing; some are caused by one formula, and others by another, nor are they infallibly produced. It depends altogether on the Church's suffrages that persons using the things blessed derive supernatural advantages. There is no reason to limit the miraculous interference of God to the early ages of the Church's history, and the Church never accepts these wonderful occurrences unless the evidence in support of their authenticity is absolutely unimpeachable.
Instances are alleged in the lives of the saints where miracles have been wrought by the blessings of holy men and women.
Read more about this topic: Blessing (Roman Catholic Church)
Famous quotes containing the word efficacy:
“If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, has some indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)