A vibrant definition of sacrament in the Roman Catholic Church connects sacrament to the Holy Spirit: “Sacraments are "powers that comes forth" from the Body of Christ, which is ever-living and life-giving. They are actions of the Holy Spirit at work in his Body, the Church." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paragraph 1116). This matches the thought of John Paul II “who sees in him [sic] the secret source of all ecclesial vitality, the guarantor of a possible transformation of the world, the principal of renewed human psychology” (Giacomo Cardinal Biffi, “The Action of The Holy Spirit in the Church and in the World” in John Paul II: A Panorama of His Teachings, p. 38).
This sacramental nature of the Church is different from the seven sacraments of the Church: “we must bear in mind that in the texts of the Council the sacramentality of the Church appears as distinct from the sacramentality that is proper, in the strict sense, to the Sacraments . . . what matters and what emerges from the analogical sense in which the word is used in the two cases is the relationship which the Church has with the power of the Holy Spirit, who alone gives life” (John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem, Section 64). We can too easily gloss over the potency of the phrase “who alone gives life”, the essence of the Mystery of Passover (i.e., the Paschal Mystery). The Mystery of the Passover carries the Israelites out of slavery to the gods of Egypt so that they can worship God and move into eternal life in the “promised land”. This is not an abstract mystery: a multitude of lambs died to accomplish the start of the Passover, just as Jesus died to accomplish the start of the redemption of human nature. This death then liberates the Holy Spirit to lead the People of God to new life, eternal life, just as Jesus’ “departure” liberates the Holy Spirit to lead the Church to eternal life through its participation in the Paschal Mystery to provide life to the “fallen” world. The Church becomes the “sacrament” of life: “All of this happens in a sacramental way, through the power of the Holy Spirit, who, "drawing from the wealth of Christ's Redemption," constantly gives life. As the Church becomes ever more aware of this mystery, she sees herself more clearly, above all as a sacrament.” (Ibid., Section 63).
This understanding of the Church as a sacrament of life to the world continues the role of the Holy Spirit in creation of man and his moving into theosis through “the context of the Book of Genesis [which] enables us to see in the creation of man the first beginning of God's salvific self-giving commensurate with the "image and likeness" of himself which he has granted to man.” (Ibid., Section 12). This means “not only rationality and freedom as constitutive properties of human nature, but also, from the very beginning, the capacity of having a personal relationship with God, as "I" and "you," and therefore the capacity of having a covenant, which will take place in God's salvific communication with man.” (Ibid., Section 34). The Church gives the world the unity of the “creation and redemption” that the Holy Spirit brings through history, a unity of hope in the realization of the universal salvation made possible by the death and resurrection of the Lamb of God: “the Holy Spirit is present and at work-he who with the breath of divine life permeates man's earthly pilgrimage and causes all creation, all history, to flow together to its ultimate end, in the infinite ocean of God” (Ibid., Section 64).
