No less ironically, the accounts which they circulated to advertise the efficacy of approved types of sacramental may inadvertently have promoted their unauthorized use.
The use of churches as public prayer rooms, not sacramental fora, began at once.
Reconciliation before his time was not a formal sacramental act detached from the eucharist, requiring the presence of a bishop, and the imposition of hands.
Priests were banned from ministering in public, but it was never intended that sacramental activity should cease.
Even so, there were gaps in this emergency structure, which made it necessary for laypeople to shoulder some of the sacramental and ritual burden.
Yet what parishioners chiefly expected from their clergy was not a sacramental religion, but preaching.
They unveil the miraculous, inexplicable side of life, and at the same time the sacramental dimensions of human existence.
Priests who kept illicit sacramental stashes for mass were a particular problem.
