More Vatican Follies: Baptism!

A couple of days ago I saw that (yet) another bizarre announcement has arisen out of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Some fellows (yes, they are all male in that hierarchy, which is another aspect of this bizarreness) have gotten their knickers twisted up because of an "irregular" formula sometimes used in baptisms. The "regular" and official way to baptize someone requires that the baptizer utter the words "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." And that is the way it is almost always done. However, some ministers (including a few Catholic priests) have decided that it would be good to use gender-neutral terms for the persons of the Holy Trinity, and they do so by saying something such as: "in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sanctifier." Same thing, one would think, yes? Is not the "Creator" the same entity that Catholics also know as the "Father"? And is not the Son of the Father, in Catholic theology, identical with the Catholic "redeemer"? And so on. The answer, I believe, is "yes, indeed." However, it appears that this will not fly, by Vatican standards. Any baptism that uses the gender-neutral words for the Trinity is... INVALID. It is now being declared that persons baptized in that manner were in fact NEVER BAPTIZED, and that any subsequent sacraments received or underwent by them (communion, penance, marriage, ordination, whatever...) are also INVALID. Anyone who knows that s/he was "baptized" with the improper, gender-neutral words, must start all over again and (the print article suggests) must even undergo new instruction in the faith in order to properly be prepared for real baptism, and any subsequent sacraments.


This, of course, is insane. In the print version of the NCR article, Msgr. Antonio Miralles is quoted as saying that "the church has no authority 'to change that which Christ himself instituted' when he told his disciples to go out and baptize 'in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.'" Now, this is (part of) what I call the "insanity." I admit that I tend to be a bit harsh with fundamentalists. Maybe a better term would be "inanity." But it is the very height of childish fundamentalism for a person (a professor at Rome's Pontifical Holy Cross University, no less) to believe and teach that there was an occasion during which the person named Jesus actually issued orders to his disciples that they must perform baptisms using these specific words: "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." If you know anything about the development of scripture, if you know anything about church history, if you know anything about the actual life and actions and words of Jesus (so far as they can reasonably be gleaned from the evidence, including scripture and the entire historical records of the time and place during and in which Jesus lived and ministered), then you can be quite sure that it did not happen exactly that way. And if you know anything about the (exclusively male) hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, you know that the real reason behind this proclamation is to stamp out the use of gender-neutral language in order to re-assert and re-emphasize male dominance, male primacy, and the (insane, or inane) idea that God has a gender, and that gender is male.


I will save for another time the larger question about the magical thinking involved in this whole way of looking at sacraments and their efficacy. Suffice it to say that there are many, many (adult) Catholics who have been taught (and who believe) at such a child-like level that, for them, to be told that their baptism might be null and void would be terribly frightening. Which is, I believe, another reason the hierarchy wishes to be so draconian in this regard. In so doing, they are, of course, engaged in what is one of the most serious sins within Catholic teaching: scandalizing and frightening the most vulnerable ones.