Were there always seven sacraments?
It took almost a thousand years for the Church to develop its understanding of how the seven rituals we call "sacraments" come to us from Jesus and give us a share in his life in a very special way. In the early centuries, for example, marriage, confirmation and penance were not recognized and named as distinct sacramental rituals in the way we would do today. But the deeper reality of Christ being present in the lives of believers was surely recognized from the very beginning: in the union of two Christians who were married, in the anointing with chrism done immediately after baptism, in the forgiveness and reconciliation with the Church that the bishop extended to sinners. It is helpful for children to know that we had these special gifts of grace from the earliest times, but many of the rituals have changed dramatically over the centuries.

Why are some people confirmed before their First Communion and others afterwards?
In the early centuries of the Church, people were fully initiated all at one time by being baptized, then confirmed, then given Holy Communion. Those three sacraments of initiation were always celebrated together and in that order. But over many centuries the three sacraments got separated in time, with baptism being given to infants and only later were Confirmation and Eucharist celebrated. It also happened that the order in which Confirmation and Eucharist were celebrated sometimes got mixed up. (Baptism, of course, has always remained the first sacrament to be celebrated.) In recent years, there have been various efforts to restore the ancient order for the initiation sacraments: Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist. This is now the required sequence when any adult or child over the age of seven is baptized. In addition, more and more local bishops are now restoring Confirmation before First Eucharist for the young people who were baptized as infants.

Why does the Church use a dove for the Holy Spirit?
The use of a dove for the Holy Spirit is actually not an official symbol of the Church. It is one of several images that the Church has used (along with fire, light, the wind, and so forth) across the centuries to convey the presence of the Holy Spirit, but it does not have any "official" status. Artists seem to have chosen the dove as a "favorite" image of the Spirit, however, and the source of their inspiration is undoubtedly the passage in the Gospels describing the baptism of Jesus by John at the Jordan River. Those texts (Matthew 3:16; Mark 1:10; Luke 3:22; John 1:32) say that the Spirit descended on Jesus "like a dove," but they do not specifically say that there was an appearance of the Spirit "in the form" of a dove. Nonetheless, the image of the dove has "stuck" in the artistic imagination and has become a regular part of Christian art. One of the limitations of this image is that the Holy Spirit is portrayed as a "dumb animal," and not as a person capable of being in intimate, loving relationship with us. When using this image with children to help them understand the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, it is important that we also use images and descriptions of the Spirit that allow them to grasp the fact that the Spirit is personal in nature and relates to us in the same way as the other Persons of the Trinity (who are more frequently imaged as Father and Son).

What is an annulment?

Jesus intended marriage to be a permanent commitment between a man and a woman, a relationship that would last throughout their entire lives. But some marriages break down, oftentimes because there is something missing from the very beginning—some element that keeps the relationship from being the kind of permanent commitment Jesus intended. An annulment is an official decree of the Church that says: Upon careful examination, after a thorough investigation, a particular failed marriage appears not to have been the kind of (sacramental) relationship that Jesus intended. A church annulment doesn't mean the marriage didn't exist; it simply says that from all appearances the failed marriage in question was not a sacrament in the full sense intended by Jesus. Children born in such marriages are not thereby declared illegitimate, since an annulment does not “dissolve” a marriage or declare that it never existed.