Anointing of the Sick

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The Anointing of the Sick is the Christian rite in which a priest anoints a seriously ill or dying person with blessed oil while praying for healing, forgiveness, and strength. In the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches it is counted among the sacraments — an act understood to do something, not merely to comfort — and for much of its history in the West it was known by a grimmer name: extreme unction, the last anointing, reserved for those thought to be dying.

The practice is rooted in a short passage in the Epistle of James, which instructs the sick to call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord, promising that the prayer of faith will save the sick and that their sins will be forgiven. Early Christian sources treat the blessing of oil and its use on the ailing as ordinary; what changed across the medieval centuries was the rite’s center of gravity. By the early Middle Ages anointing had drifted toward the deathbed, becoming the final act in a sequence administered to the dying — confession, anointing, and a last communion called viaticum, provisions for the journey. The popular phrase last rites names that whole sequence, not the anointing alone, though the two are often confused.

The traditions that keep the rite hold it as more than medicine. Catholic teaching, fixed in its essentials at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, holds that the anointing confers grace, lifts the remnants of sin, and may restore bodily health if that serves the soul’s good. The Eastern Orthodox office of the euchelaion — the prayer-oil, often celebrated by several priests together — frames anointing chiefly as healing and the remission of sins, and is administered to the living faithful rather than withheld for the end. Protestant reformers, finding the scriptural warrant thin and the late-medieval form overgrown, largely set the sacrament aside, though some churches retained a ministry of anointing for the sick.

In 1972, following the Second Vatican Council, the Roman church revised the rite and pressed a deliberate change of emphasis: no longer extreme unction for the dying but anointing of the sick, offered to anyone gravely ill or weakened by age, and repeatable as illness returns. The shift was partly a recovery — scholars and reformers argued that the older healing rite of James had been narrowed over time into a sacrament of death, and that the narrowing was a historical accident worth undoing.

What the rite has carried throughout, under either name, is a particular hope: that the moment of bodily extremity is also a moment open to grace, and that the oil traced on a failing body marks the body as still held within the church’s care. Whether it heals the flesh is left, in the prayers themselves, to God.

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