 Hi, I'm Mary Harrell for Tan Books. Is your piety showing? Maybe you've got a little scapular sticking out right there. Maybe you've got a rosary in your pocket. Maybe you've got some dried palms from last Palm Sunday sticking out of a frame in your living room. If so, you are living a pious Catholic life full of sacramentals. Sacramentals have long been a part of Catholic life. And here today to tell us more about them is the one and only Sean McAfee. Sean has long been a part of the Catholic media scene. He's the founder of epicpew.com and the author of several books, including Epic Saints, Wild, Wonderful, and Weird Stories of God's Heroes. He writes for numerous Catholic publications, including the National Catholic Register. And today we're talking about his newest release, The Compendium of Sacramentals, Encyclopedia of the Church's Blessings, Signs, and Devotions. Sean, thanks for being here. Yeah, thank you for that nice introduction, Mary. Absolutely. Sean, give us just the baseline definition of a sacramental for Catholics. What is it actually considered? Yeah, there are many definitions that the Church has tried to use in the last 2000 years to describe sacramentals. And around the third century, they realized, hey, we need to stop saying sacramental or sacrament for these things. They are not efficacious as the sacraments are in reducing sanctifying grace. What the Church says is that they are objects, devotions, and exorcisms that signify the effects of a spiritual nature through the intercession of the Church. And what they want us to know is that these dispose us to go and receive the sacraments, to have a sanctified life, to lead us to holiness, and hopefully into the kingdom of heaven one day. Okay. So Sean, then the next question is, why did you write a whole book about them? What was so exciting about them for you that allowed you to write so many beautiful pages on the topic? I was hoarding all these rosaries and I wanted to know why. I wrote a little book with Catholic Answers on the 20 Answer Series defending the use of sacramentals and relics. And by the end of that book, there was a word count there that I had to stick with and by the end of writing that book, I had at least four of those types of books to write. I had like 90,000 words of content to write. I knew that I just wanted to share it. Also one of the opportunity, one of my favorite things about writing is discovery. I really wanted to know more about them too and then I wanted to of course share that. So I pitched this book to Tan as a way more simple idea, just like a little nine by five book or something manual series book on how to use them and what they are. And then they give me the opportunity to write this gorgeous book. And I still can't believe that they trusted me with this but they sent it to me as if I had to approve it. Like I would approve their idea. Well, of course I assented to it. So that's how we got going. I don't think they regret it yet either. I think you're still, I think they're still good with it. Sean, you include a scripture passage from St. Paul at the start of the book that I love. Stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us either by word of mouth or by letter from Thessalonians, second Thessalonians. What do sacramentals have to do with standing firm and holding to tradition? Well, that's a great question. There are many ways to answer that. What I had in mind whenever I wrote that is that they really the historicity that I discovered with these. I was surprised to learn things like metals. I figured that this was something I knew that the St. Benedict metal went back as late as like the 15th, maybe 16th century or at least the design of it as it stands today. I knew that, of course, the story of Catherine, laboratory and the miraculous metal. So I figured things like metals were produced sometime in the last couple of hundred years, but actually in the catacombs of Dometilla, they found that what Christians would do is they would take the local amulets, the little coins that would have a Caesar's name and face on it or maybe one of their gods and they would melt them and restrike them with the image of their saints. St. Christopher is one of the oldest of these or maybe an image of Christ and his passion or maybe the image of the blessed Virgin Mary, things like that and other sacraments go back further than that like holy water, of course. And so what I had in mind was just, hey, look, let's embrace these, let's preserve these, let's use these, let's practice these and let's, of course, he's talking about standing fast to the traditions, let's pass them to the next generation. That's really what I had in mind, Mary. I love that. I have no idea, back to the catacombs, is that what you said? Yeah, so like they date these back and most of even the most scrutinous studies date them back to like the third or fourth centuries, which means there was probably a practice before that, right? Cause what they think is that these Christians as they kind of start to fill in the catacombs, that they would dump them in there to get rid of kind of the evidence, so to speak. Yeah, unreal. I think for Catholics sometimes they can think sacramentals are just Catholic superstition, right? The where this, you don't go, where this when you die and you don't go to hell. So how do you combat the whole, this is just the get out of jail free card for Catholics? Yeah, well it's kind of a nerdy answer, but you gotta go back to how the church defines things, right? We have to get rid of all those misnomers about like the sabotein privileges, the one that you had just alluded to with the brown scapular, just putting something over yourself, of course would be superstitious and silly to think that a piece of cloth is what's gonna forgive your sins and sanctify you and get you to heaven. What the church really wants us to know is that these should move our hearts, like the crucifix behind me. Staring at one of those, I had to get more than the feet in there, right? Staring at one of those and contemplating the passion during Lent, or doing the stations of the cross, that's a sacramental doing the stations of the cross and those pious devotion should move our hearts and like we said, dispose us to have want a life of sanctification and the way that Catholics teach process of sanctification is to go and receive the sacraments and to have that lifestyle. Sean, you bring up the stations of the cross as being a sacramental. I don't think most Catholics know that the stations of the cross is a sacramental sign, or a sacramental and that you have a section of the book called sacramental signs and of course there's the smells and bells that are the sacraments we all know but you cover blessed chalk, you cover blessed salt, holy oils. Why do you think the church gives us such a variety of these tactile sacramentals that really fill our senses when we use them? Yeah, well, I'm gonna take a different way to answer that question. The Vatican II document, sacrosanctum concilium, that's the constitution on sacred liturgy, very important document for the church today, gives us a lot of definitions of how the church interprets different items and what they say about sacramentals is they literally say this is kind of a quote. They say nearly anything can be baptized by the church to remind us of our faith and that's directly talking about sacramental. So just about everything, they used to call sacramentals, they used to call scapulars a badge and maybe two, 300 years ago, they said, hey, in place of a sacramental, if you're in a difficult place to live or your scapular is being torn constantly, you can wear a medal in place of that. So kind of a backwards way of answering your question but the church wants us to be able to use the items around us that can increase our faith. Now it's kind of got to make sense and it can't just be anything. The church does have to approve of these formally in order for them to rise to the dignity of a sacramental but yes, there are many kinds, of course they're used to smells and bills, I love that, I'm gonna have to use that from now on. All my future interviews, I'm gonna say that but what we have is also the non-visible ways of worshiping Christ and imitating other saints and that's through those devotionals and those items of popular piety which the physical and the non-physical fall into like devotion to the sacred heart, the immaculate heart of Mary, those are also sacramentals. Do relics fall into the category of sacramentals or is that a different category entirely? There is a two-part answer to this. The direct answer is no, like a regular bone of a saint or a piece of their hair or something is not a sacramental, even a second-class relic of their clothes or their breviary or something that is not considered a sacramental. It's not instituted by the church, it's a relic because of that saint's holiness. And of course we have the importance of remembering that sacramentals involve the intercession of the church. Well, the church isn't interceding to make that saint a saint. They're just declaring it a valid person in heaven, right? But the other part to that answer is that of course you can touch a sacramental to a relic and create a third-class relic, right? So you touch your crucifix. I have one in my closet here, my bookshelf. I have a third-class relic of Saint Dominic. It was touched to a piece of his bone whenever I was in Italy. I was very blessed to do that. One of my priests had like 40 relics and he was like, which one do you want to touch it to? He did that for me and it was unsealed. And so yeah, so it's both and. It's classic both and you can create a type of relic, third-class relic out of a sacramental. Wow, it's like 4D chess. I can't keep up. That's incredible. Sean, exorcisms come up frequently in this beautiful book. I think that may surprise people. What does a rosary or a crucifix have to do with an exorcism? Again, it's all about the intercession of the church, particularly with exorcisms. We're not thinking always about the movies, the exorcist, wonderful movie. Like it's actually pretty moving now that I'm a Catholic and I can watch that, but we're not talking about horror films and things like that. We're talking about the church's intercession in removing the presence of evil within an object, a person, or a place or preventing that from happening. So we actually see these more often than we realize. Anybody with children who has had them baptized with a Catholic priest or deacon has had and seen an exorcism. There is a sentence to that. An extraordinary form baptism we point out in the book has three exorcisms. And then some sacramentals provide exorcisms as well, like holy water may provide exorcism. And then the blessing, the traditional blessing of a Medal of St. Benedict does come with an exorcism for that, which is really appropriate because I'd say St. Benedict is one of the chief exorcists of Catholic history. We had our sixth baby had an extraordinary form baptism and the little, the blessed salt, the exorcising of the newborn's tongue, man. Yep, yeah. We had one as well for our fifth child in Nersia by the monks of St. Benedict over there. And whoa, what an experience. Yeah, we had to smuggle our kid all the way down there during COVID. That was great. Fantastic. Okay, so over on the subject of children, you and your wife, Jessica, raising, is it six now, I believe? Six, love it. Six, six, I can't believe it. I know it's not as much as some, but if you knew me, you'd be like, how? Well, so what sacramentals do you think are best for kids? Both to handle or to wear and the best to help them understand what you're talking about here and the church's definitions of what they are. Just about all of them. We try to incorporate everything from the smells and bills. We do, on our Sunday rosary, we do light and incense, and then we pour the little granules onto the little puck of chocolate. Puck of chocolate, as they call it, but it's charcoal. We do that even though we try, that's kind of a quote-unquote fire hazard, but it helps the kids really say, hey, look, something's different going on, but something different is going on, which I think is very important. Of course, along with that, we do pray the rosary. We use holy water at comp line. We have the fonts around the house. Just about all of them. And I taught CCD for a year to the military community in Northern Italy. And I think I taught second grade and I made sure that year that I went through all of the chief sacramentals that the kids could see around their house and appreciate and know that, hey, look, this isn't just another toy that your mom gave you to stay silent in church. This is something real. It's something that means something and it's something that we need to treat with dignity. And I'm a firm believer of that and I'll try to wrap it up with this one statement is that I think that kids are just like adults that way where we get enamored with the physical world around us and we want to see the items that represent our faith and what better way to do that for children than through the direct use of sacramentals? Yeah, absolutely. The good old teething rosary, it's really classic in the Catholic circles, but also nice to pray with. Sean, to wrap up here, the book, as you said, is simply gorgeous. This is a gorgeous book. The third compendium that Tan has released, two more on the Blessed Virgin Mary and on Miracles, just great books. What do you hope people glean from reading more, learning more about sacramentals across the Catholic Church? Well, more than appreciation, I just want people to use these sacramentals, not just the physical objects, of course, but half the book is the devotions. So we have these sacramentals. We talked about stations of the cross. You know, let's point out an interesting fact here is that the stations of the cross sacramental isn't just a devotion. It's actually the physical crosses, the 14 physical crosses that are posted in a church. And I hope that they don't just come away with appreciation for it, but they say, you know what? I'm gonna try one of these, or I'm gonna expand my devotions and try something else too. I'm gonna pray a different novena or something like that. Sorry, one more on the fly. Is there anything coming up for Advent and for the season of Christmas that is especially relevant in sacramentals to liturgical life right now? Yeah, you know, I kind of regret not putting it in this book, but Advent wreaths are a sacramental. Yeah, you know, there's a limited count of things that I could have done. And that those, and there is also a Christmas novena that starts actually at the end of November, Google it, it starts at the end of November and goes for nine weeks and ends Christmas Day. Wow, that's not the St. Andrew novena. I think it is. Or is it the same, it begins on St. Andrew's Feast Day right November 30th or something. Wow, the novena itself is a sacramental. Yes, all novenas are sacramentals. They are pious devotions instituted by the church with their intercession. Great. Fantastic. Again, the book is Compendium of Sacramentals and Cyclopedia of the Church's Blessings, Signs and Devotions. You can find it right here on tanbooks.com and also at your local Catholic bookseller. Sean, congrats on this amazing project. I'm so glad it was turned into something bigger than what you thought. Congrats and have a wonderful advent and Christmas season with your family. Thanks, Mary.