Futile and Fertile Fonts

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - March 14, 2008

Each year during the Easter Vigil, which we will celebrate eight days from now, about 150,000 American adults enter the Church through the waters of baptism. Or at least they think they do.

In some cases — for no fault of their own, but because of the "maxima culpa" of the minister who baptized them — these catechumens have not received the sacrament, even though they left the font just as wet as those who did.

The reason was given February 29th in a brief response by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to two queries about the validity of baptisms celebrated in certain places in North America.

The first question was whether "baptism conferred with the formulas 'I baptize you in the name of the Creator, and of the Redeemer, and of the Sanctifier' and 'I baptize you in the name of the Creator, and of the Liberator, and of the Sustainer' is valid?" The answer from was a definitive "no." The second question was whether "persons baptized with those formulas have to be baptized" again with the proper form "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." The answer was "yes."

These questions were relevant because certain clerics, mostly in the United States and Canada, had taken it upon themselves to change the words of the traditional Trinitarian formula during the celebration of baptism. The terms "Father" and "Son" were considered by them sexist and exclusive and for that reason the "gender inclusive" terms of "Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier," or "Creator, Liberator and Sustainer" were substituted as putative equivalents.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith clarified once and for all that these sacramental switcheroos are not equivalent. The reason they are defective is not merely because they fail to use the terms "Father" and "Son" that Jesus himself revealed, or because they change the formula Jesus commanded in the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19, or because they do not identify God as male. They are inadequate primarily because they fail to communicate what theologians call the "relations of origin" among the three persons in the one God that constitute the ground for the distinction among them. "Father" and "Son" refer to the distinct relation of generation, with the Father being Father in relation to the Son and the Son being Son in relation to the Father. The Holy Spirit is distinct in what theologians call the "relation of spiration," with the Holy Spirit proceeding "from the Father and the Son" together. These relations of origin are simply not maintained in the other formulas: the Church has always held that all three persons of the Blessed Trinity, and not just one of the three, are involved in the divine actions of creation, redemption and sanctification.

Thankfully, the use of these defective formulas is rather rare in the Catholic Church. One place close to home where it did occur was at the Paulist Center near Boston Common. When Cardinal Bernard Law in the early 1990s discovered that the priests at the center were using the defective formula, he publicly announced the invalidity of the baptisms and instructed the priests to track down those who had received the invalid sacramental rites so that they could in fact receive what they were hoping to receive.

Where the problem of invalid baptisms because of these deficient formulas is more common, however, is with various Protestant Churches — especially with progressive mainline Churches who subscribe to radical notions of gender inclusive language as well as with non-denominational Christian churches that are free-wheeling in their liturgical practices. On many occasions, when a person baptized in one of these churches wishes to become a Catholic, serious problems arise.

Priests in the New Bedford area, for example, often encounter complicated situations with those Catholics who have been baptized at Seaman's Bethel. Because of the way this place of worship contracts with Protestant ministers who come to perform rites, there is no way to determine whether someone baptized there on a given occasion was baptized in the proper Trinitarian manner. When Catholic families choose to take their children there to be baptized— often because their proposed godparents are canonically unqualified to serve within the Catholic Church — they are generally unaware that their loved ones may not be receiving the sacrament at all. Sometimes, later, when they enroll their children in CCD in preparation for First Communion, the priest or the religious education director in charge may just presume that the child is a validly baptized Catholic, and in some cases neither is true. There have been recent cases when such people have fallen through the cracks, gone through CCD instruction, thought they received the sacraments of first penance, first Communion, and Confirmation, only to discover during marriage preparation that, because their baptism was of questionable of validity or known to be invalid, they needed to receive all the sacraments "again." This was because only someone validly baptized can receive the other sacraments, like confirmation, marriage and holy orders; if one's baptism were invalid, the other sacraments would be invalid as well.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's declaration, therefore, is by no means merely a question of word choice. Because of the importance of baptism for salvation — "He who believes and is baptized will be saved" Jesus said, "but he who does not believe will be condemned" (Mk 16:16) — we are dealing with an issue of enormous consequence. It involves the reality both of who God is and who, through baptism, we are called to become.

Hopefully the Congregation's doctrinal note helps to bring this form of inexcusable liturgical experimentation inside and outside the Catholic Church to an end and encourages those who have been invalidly baptized to come to receive the sacrament they should have received the "first" time.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.