Confirmation: How a Sacrament of God’s Grace Became All About Us by Timothy R. Gabrielli (review)

Among liturgists and catechists alike, there is near universal agreement (a hard task to achieve!) that present formation and practice around the Sacrament of Confirmation are lacking. Although Timothy Gabrielli’s Confirmation: How a Sacrament of God’s Grace Became All About Us does not seek to solve the pastoral problems that often accompany formation for and celebration of the sacrament, it does offer a genealogy of the theological assumptions that have governed discourse relative to the sacrament in the United States in the twentieth century. In this regard, Gabrielli’s book offers pastoral leaders an awareness how the most common arguments around the sacrament developed within an American context.

Gabrielli’s book traces the development of approaches to formative relative to the Sacrament of Confirmation from Pope Pius X’s Quam Singulari to the present day. Along the way, one discovers a sacrament consistently interpreted according to the (often unexamined) cultural concerns of the time. Once children begin to receive their first Communion before Confirmation, an unintended consequence of Pius X’s emphasis on frequent and early reception of the Eucharist, the Sacrament of Confirmation becomes the privileged initiation into the work of Catholic Action, preparing lay Catholics to engage in the world as soldiers of Christ; one component of a larger constellation of sacraments of initiation; the sacrament of maturity, enabling Catholics to “choose” their identity; a fresh baptism into the Spirit, affiliated with the charismatic movement; a rite of identity formation, which has varying degrees of success (based upon the cultural understanding of the sacrament as a “graduation rite” from religious education). Gabrielli’s history of the sacrament in the United States draws on leaders from the Liturgical Movement, formation materials for the sacrament composed by religious educators, as well as present-day practitioners. The historical account that Gabrielli provides is fascinating not simply for shedding light on those modern assumptions that color our interpretation of the sacrament. Instead, he presents a model of an approach to liturgical history that is attentive to the theological and cultural influences of the day. Liturgical development is never separated from the broader intellectual and social history of the time, and liturgical historians of any era will appreciate the economical way that Gabrielli examines a century of American history.

Although Gabrielli is reticent to prescribe a univocal way forward for the celebration of the sacrament, he does offer in the final chapter a three-fold emphasis that Confirmation and the formation for it should emphasize the rite as a reception and celebration of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian, focus upon a formation into an ecclesial identity, and avoid the trappings of an individualism that puts too much emphasis on personal choice. It is this last chapter that Gabrielli makes a particular contribution to debates around the Sacrament of Confirmation. Specifically, Gabrielli moves beyond a theological concern about whether the Sacrament of Confirmation is an extraneous rite because the Spirit is also received in baptism. Quoting Gabrielli: “The first impulse here might be to distinguish the effects of baptism from those of confirmation, which would lead to the protestation that the Holy Spirit has already been received in baptism. If, instead, we look to confirmation as a celebration of the Person of the Holy Spirit, the emphasis changes. In confirmation we celebrate an ongoing relationship with a Person. The church never considers anyone to have fully encompassed the Spirit, or really to have received the Spirit in the Spirit’s completeness” (74).

Because Gabrielli describes Confirmation as a rite of encountering the Spirit of God, a deeper entrance (not complete maturation) into the self-giving love of the Father and the Son that animates the Church, he does not state that there must be a univocal approach to the sacrament throughout the United States. The implication of Gabrielli’s argument is that the reception of the Spirit in...