The Seven Sacraments of the Catholic Church

By: Romanus Cessario

Narrated by: Al Kessel

There are seven sacraments administered in the Catholic Church. What are they, and what do they do? Why do human beings require sacramentalized, visible realities to seal their confession of faith in Jesus Christ? Why does the Catholic Church administer the sacraments in the way that it does?

Leading Catholic theologian Romanus Cessario, OP, offers an in-depth explanation of the seven sacraments celebrated in the Catholic Church. He addresses the rationale for the sacraments and provides detailed exposition of each one, highlighting the importance of the Catholic tradition—and of Thomas Aquinas, in particular—for contemporary reflection on the sacraments.

This book examines why participation in the sacramental life of the Church is required for the believing Christian and helps listeners understand the role the sacraments play in the sanctification of the world.

©2023 Romanus Cessario, OP (P)2023 eChristian

Probably the best treatment of the Sacraments

Protestants, read at your own risk. This is a full and succinct drive into the breadth of the Church's 2000 year old training.

My only critic is that the reader seemingly can't pronounce the Latin terms and seems to have little functional knowledge of how many terms are said.

Good Book, terrible reading

First of all, the book itself is quite good. Cessation has written a book on sacramental theology to counterbalance some literature in the field published over the last half century. He tends to over-rely on Trent and St. Thomas and could do with better engagement of the field of liturgical theology and modern theologians (even those he disagrees with).
However the narration is terrible. Theology is a science, this science has a specialist vocabulary and uses a lot of Latin terms. Both technical terms and Latin are mangled. There is hardly a sentence in the work that does not have a mispronounced word. He even manages to mispronounce common Catholic words such as "Diocese" or "Avila." Someone who understands theology should narrate. This narration almost useless (I did listen to it all, but I had to buy the print book to understand what the narrator was saying). This leads to a personal bugbear of mine. Theology should be treated seriously. Customers would not stand for a baseball book being mangled so badly and if a was a medical textbook was read so badly, it would put lives at risk! But because we are dealing with theology, we just ignore the problem. If Audible was serious about quality control, they would re-record this title using the services of a narrator that can pronounce the specialist vocabulary that the book uses.