Psychology and Religion: West and East (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 11)
The Catholic Church, for instance, administers the sacraments for the purpose of bestowing their spiritual blessings upon the believer; but since this act would amount to enforcing the presence of divine grace by an indubitably magical procedure, it is logically argued that nobody can compel divine grace to be present in the sacramental act, but that it is nevertheless inevitably present since the sacrament is a divine institution which God would not have caused to be if he had not intended to lend it his support. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 7.
Although the Catholic Church has often been accused of particular rigidity, she nevertheless admits that dogma is a living thing and that its formulation is therefore capable of change and development.
Even the number of dogmas is not limited and can be multiplied in the course of time. The same holds true of the ritual.
Yet all changes and developments are determined within the framework of the facts as originally experienced, and this sets up a special kind of dogmatic content and emotional value. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 10.
Image: Seven Sacraments Altarpiece by Rogier van der Weyden, c.1448.
What is ordinarily called “religion” is a substitute to such an amazing degree that I ask myself seriously whether this kind of “religion,” which I prefer to call a creed, may not after all have an important function in human society.
The substitute has the obvious purpose of replacing immediate experience by a choice of suitable symbols tricked out with an organized dogma and ritual.
The Catholic Church maintains them by her indisputable authority, the Protestant “church” (if this term is still applicable) by insistence on belief in the evangelical message.
So long as these two principles work, people are effectively protected against immediate religious experience.
Even if something of the sort should happen to them, they can refer to the Church, for she would know whether the experience came from God or from the devil, and whether it is to be accepted or rejected. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 75.