Do hidden Miraculous Medals do any good?

[VioletIris]

I am very preoccupied with saving souls from damnation. I would like to strategically place Miraculous Medals along with St. Benedict medals in the belongings of certain persons I know, but I wonder if that is doing any good, without that person’s resignation to the medal. And considering they could find the medal and mistreat it, I am even more hesitant. Today I start a 54-day Rosary Novena for the conversion of sinners but I want to do more.

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

Your zeal is commendable and I hope that you will continue in your work to save souls. Two things to keep in mind:

One, sacramentals are not magic charms. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

Sacramentals do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do, but by the Church’s prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it. “For well-disposed members of the faithful, the liturgy of the sacraments and sacramentals sanctifies almost every event of their lives with the divine grace which flows from the paschal mystery of the passion, death, and Resurrection of Christ. From this source all sacraments and sacramentals draw their power. There is scarcely any proper use of material things which cannot be thus directed toward the sanctification of men and the praise of God” (CCC 1670).

When there is any assumption that the very action of placing a sacramental will “work” independently of the acceptance of grace according to the free will of the recipient (in other words, “overriding” that person’s free will), then the sacramental is being used superstitiously as a magic charm:

Superstition is the deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition (CCC 2111).

And, two, it is important that you respect the individual’s free will and freedom of conscience. To become “very preoccupied with saving souls from damnation” can lead someone into the temptation to believe that he or she knows someone may be damned unless Something Is Done, and that the Something To Be Done must be done by the missionary. In other words, it leads to the temptation to believe that you can read hearts and know that the person is not just sincerely mistaken but evilly intentioned and thus headed toward hell. This is not to discourage you from praying for souls; it is only to warn you to remember that God and not man reads the human heart and knows that person’s final destination.

As a related but side note to respect for persons, keep in mind that the reason someone might mistreat a sacramental he finds hidden in his belongings might not necessarily be hatred for God but hatred for the fact that another person has invaded his privacy by going through his belongings in order to hide something among them. It would be far better for a sacramental to be forthrightly offered and refused than it would be for a Catholic to share culpability for the mistreatment of a sacramental because he did not respect the privacy and personal dignity of the sinner he was seeking to save.

Recommended reading:

Fear of All Error? by Michelle Arnold