Renamed on Purpose, in 1972

The anointing of the sick rests on a single biblical instruction, in the Letter of James, that the sick should call for the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil, a text cited as its basis for as long as the sacrament has been discussed as such. For much of the sacrament's later history it was known in the Latin church as extreme unction, the last anointing, a name that itself teaches a theology: it identified the sacrament so closely with the moment of death that its practical use narrowed toward a rite reserved for those actually dying, administered once, near the end, rather than the more general ministry to serious illness the biblical text describes. The Second Vatican Council explicitly revisited this narrowing in the 1960s, and Pope Paul VI's 1972 reform of the sacrament formally renamed it the anointing of the sick, removed the implication that it required someone at the point of death, and instructed clergy to offer it earlier and more readily to anyone facing serious illness or surgery, explicitly correcting what the reform's own text describes as a pastoral narrowing that had grown up around the older name. Catholic teaching after the reform is therefore explicit that the sacrament may be received more than once across a lifetime of serious illness, in direct contrast to the popular association with a single deathbed visit that the older name had encouraged.