"'Spiritual combat' is another element of life which needs to be taught anew and proposed once more to all Christians today. It is a secret and interior art, an invisible struggle in which we engage every day against the temptations, the evil suggestions that the demon tries to plant in our hearts."
Saint John Paul II

CatholicSacramentals.org is your online source for information on the sacramentals of the Catholic Church, specifically the Crucifix, Holy Rosary, Brown Scapular, Saint Benedict Medal, Miraculous Medal (Medal of the Immaculate Conception), Holy Water, Blessed Oil, Blessed Salt and Statues. Our online shop provides heirloom quality items for sale hoping to foster devotion to the power of the Church's sacramentals.

Although we have stressed the truth that the sacramentals derive their efficacy chiefly from the intercessory power of the Church, we may not minimize the role played by man's own subjective dispositions. The sacraments, too, for that matter, demand something of the individual recipient--at the very least that the subject place no obstacle in the way of grace. But in the case of the sacramentals man's cooperation has a very large part to play if they are to attain their full purpose. Their function is to provide an atmosphere in which the virtue of religion can thrive, and to produce a psychological reaction in man, to raise his thoughts and aspirations out of the realm of the profane and up to the realm of the sacred, to fix his heart on the things of the spirit, to impress on his consciousness God's will for him and God's providence always hovering over him.