Imagine that you are in a classroom with a group of teenagers, and they begin to ask you why they should be confirmed, why they should be married in the church, why they have to receive the Eucharist, and why they have to go to confession. Standard answers to these legitimate questions generally are based upon church regulations. Kenan Osborne maintains that the entire framework of the discussion is changed if the starting point is God's action on us. Support for such a starting point emerges from Osborne's analysis of part 2, section 1 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “The Sacramental Economy,” which begins with article 1, “The Liturgy—Work of the Holy Trinity.” Here, he emphasizes the answer that the Catechism provides: God the Father is blessing people, Jesus is making the grace of God efficaciously present to people, and the Holy Spirit is bringing the gift of faith to those who are present, transforming them into the mystery of Christ, uniting them to the community called church. Osborne maintains that such a starting point is a powerful way of beginning lectures and writings on the sacramental life, because the issues of “who is the minister,” “who is the recipient,” “what is the basic matter,” and “what is the basic form” are all responses and reactions to what the Father, Son, and Spirit are doing.

In contrast, the Catechism's presentation on the sacraments in part 2, section 2, “The Seven Sacraments of the Church,” is the object of much criticism by Osborne. Despite the Catechism's claim of continuity between the two sections, Osborne cites a lack of interconnection between the two. Further, he indicates that the treatment on the seven sacraments is “in many ways a re-run of the sacramental theology one finds in the Catholic theological text-books from 1800–1950” (28). Particularly, he notes that this section is minimalistic in its reference to the rich study of the history of the seven sacraments that has taken place from 1896 to 2014, resulting in “simply a repeat of pre-Vatican II sacramental theology” (137).

Osborne's analysis of the Catechism's treatment of the sacraments is carried out within the larger context of the major theological positions that have developed regarding the Roman Catholic theology of sacraments in the fifty years since Vatican II. In addition to the two disparate treatments of sacraments found in the Catechism, Osborne underlines the importance for sacramental theology of the understanding of the human nature of Jesus Christ as a sacrament of God's own nature (presented by Edward Schillebeeckx in 1960), the exposition of the church as the original sacrament (presented by Otto Semmelroth in 1960, and then in a more developed way by Karl Rahner in 1961), and the position of the church as the basic sacrament, which is found in the documents of Vatican II. Regarding the last point, Osborne goes to great lengths to refute those theologians who maintain that the Council Fathers understood the church not as a sacrament in itself, but simply “similar to a sacrament” (veluti sacramentum).

A final word should be devoted to the author himself, who in his own words has been “Franciscanized” for seventy-one of his eighty-three years. His lifetime of devoted study of the sacraments enables him to present a breadth of theological traditions that have influenced sacramental theology—Augustinian, Thomistic, and Franciscan—and he is to be forgiven if, in the case of the latter, he is not impartial.