First of all, a big welcome to the Saints Simon and Jude adoration team that “found” my blog after Annie sent it out last week. So glad you are here! Today’s idea comes from a question that my uncle asked me yesterday: “Why do Catholics baptize infants and some other Christians do not?”
This question got me thinking about the gift of Baptism and the assumptions that can lie behind a seemingly straightforward question. The following is a response to the direct question as well as to the indirect questions within it.
But first, here are two pictures: Sister Teresa and me with our goddaughter Lucia; me with my godson George.
Now, for the question at hand: Why do Catholics and some other Christians baptize infants and other Christians do not? In addition to my uncle’s query, I was reminded of this important question by a man who has recently come back to the Catholic Church. He had been baptized as an infant and then “re-baptized” in a Baptist church because they told him his first Baptism “didn’t count.”
Here is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say:
1250 Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth of Baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called. The sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation is particularly manifest in infant Baptism. The Church and the parents would deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confirm Baptism shortly after birth.
1251 Christian parents will recognize that this practice accords with their role as nurturers of the life that God has entrusted to them.
1252 The practice of infant Baptism is an immemorial tradition of the Church. There is explicit testimony to this practice from the second century on, and it is quite possible that, from the beginning of the apostolic preaching, when whole “households” received baptism, infants may also have been baptized.
Let’s unpack that. Original sin means that we are born into a fallen state. The Church believes that original sin is wiped away by Baptism. The positive way to say this is that we become adopted children of God at Baptism, a status that we lost with the Fall of our first parents. This adoption is, according to the Catechism, a “priceless grace.” Infant Baptism highlights something really amazing: this priceless grace is precisely that, grace. It is a completely gratuitous gift of God. Infant Baptism draws our attention to the gift that we have not merited “the grace of salvation.”
Parents are the “nurturers of the life that God has entrusted to them.” This means that the parents provide many things that the child needs without asking the permission of the child, such as food, sleep, changed diapers, and education. The Church recognizes that Baptism is the most nurturing thing a parent can do for the child.
Lastly, the Catechism points out that infant Baptism has always been practiced by the Church, and even if the Bible does not say “Thou shalt baptize infants,” the Bible does speak about whole households receiving Baptism. It is very likely that those households included young ones not old enough to assent to being baptized.
Okay, I think the Catechism is pretty clear. But I don’t think that what the Catechism says will convince those Christians who reject infant Baptism. Why? The Catechism, being Catholic, makes a number of assumptions that many modern Christians, both inside and outside the Catholic Church, accept as givens. I would like to point out some of those givens in an attempt to understand the broader mindset of the Catholic teaching.
1) “Only what I choose has value.” Stanley Hauerwas (not a Catholic) says that what marks the mindset of Modernity is the belief that only those things that I choose have value, that is, only the things I choose really “count.” If we baptize infants, those Baptisms aren’t worth anything because they were chosen on behalf of the infant. The infant did not choose Baptism, and therefore it was not a free choice. Free choice is what gives value to something.
The Catholic view is not simply the opposite of this. It is not as if Modernity says that only free choice counts and the Church says that free choice does not count. The Catholic view is that no one is simply a free individual. We all belong to more than just ourselves. There is a free choice involved in Baptism; it is just that the free choice is the choice of the parents and godparents to give the infant the greatest gift, the gift of salvation. In the individualistic modern world, we have been fooled into thinking that this does not really count. Freedom is freedom of choice. For the Catholic, freedom is the ability to choose the good. For the first part of our lives we are not able to choose the good for ourselves, and so someone else has to act on our behalf, choosing the good for us, whether that good is food, sleep, education, or faith. For the Catholic, faith is not an individual option chosen from a menu of equally valid options. No, faith is something that exists before our choice, something into which we are placed. We sometimes call the Catholic faith simply “the Faith.”
At a certain point in our lives, of course, there is a crisis. The word “crisis” comes from the Greek word for “judgment.” It is true: at a certain point in my life I have to judge for myself and choose what has been chosen for me. I have to choose the hour I go to bed or what I eat or what I study. But there is no question about the value of sleep or food or study. Similarly with the faith: what will the faith look like in my life? This is called vocation. We all have different vocations, certainly, and we have to discern the way the faith will express itself in my world, with my talents, temperament, etc. But we don’t just make up our vocation. Jesus Himself said, “It was not you who chose me but I who chose you to go and bear fruit that will last.” Are we less free because Jesus has chosen us? I don’t think so. But the freedom Christ gives is the freedom to flourish in the good and not just the freedom to choose anything I want. Again, this only bothers us to the extent that we have all swallowed the assumptions of the modern world.
2) To live as a Catholic is to live within Tradition. The argument for infant Baptism is an argument from Tradition. There is no reason to change what has been the explicit practice of the Church from the very beginning. There is especially no reason to change when the change would mean a capitulation to a non-Christian understanding of freedom. In fact, the argument from Tradition is a simple corollary to point #1 above. If what is good is only what was freely chosen, then there can be nothing given, nothing that comes before (as the subtitle to this post says). To say that only what I choose is real or good or valuable is to say that nothing comes before me. This is literally impossible—we live in a world of givens. But the attitude we take toward these givens is where the rubber hits the road.
I do not think that Tradition needs to be appropriated in an unthinking way. This would do away with the necessary work of “crisis” or “judgment” as described above. In fact, we do not really receive the Tradition until we have passed through the crisis by which we put it to the test. And part of this test is being aware of what we would be throwing away if we were to get rid of a particular tradition. Do we really want to accept the modern view of freedom implied by those who reject infant Baptism? Do we really want to deprive children of the grace of salvation? That last question is not meant to scare—I do not think God rejects unbaptized babies. But wondering about what God would or would not do to unbaptized babies is not the point. If we are believers, then we believe that Baptism is a great gift. The question is whether we would want to deprive those we love of that great gift?
3) Which leads to the last point that really should have been the first point. But I am not going to go back and change it! The point is this: Baptism really does something. The Protestant view of the sacraments, and please correct me if I get this wrong, is that they are not “efficacious.” This means that the sacrament of Baptism does not actually save us; it is faith alone that saves us. The Catholic view of the sacraments is that they are efficacious, that they actually do what they signify. In washing with water and saying the words of Baptism, the child (or adult) is really cleansed of sin, becomes a member of the Body of Christ, is saved. In eating the consecrated Body and Blood of Christ, the believer is really incorporated into the Body of Christ, the Church.
In fact (boy this really should have gone first!), if we believe that the sacraments are efficacious, then we would want that effect to happen as soon as possible (“quam primum” is what the Code of Canon Law says). On the other hand, if we believe that the sacraments are only pointers to a faith that already exists, then no wonder we don’t baptize infants.
I want to end by throwing a bone to the other side. Of course, faith has to be a personal choice. But that is not all that faith is. The Church is always trying to balance two sides: in this case, the free grace of God and the life-transforming commitment that faith entails. It would be terrible to collapse the tension to one side or the other. On the one hand, we could collapse and say that the faith given in the grace of Baptism to an infant does not have to be nurtured and cultivated so that the child can one day say his or her own, personal yes to grace. To understand the sacraments in this way turns them into magic rituals that “automatically” effect something. We have all known people in whom the grace of Baptism was not nurtured and cultivated, in whom Baptism seems to lie dormant. On the other hand, we could collapse, as many of our Protestant brothers and sisters do, and say that only individual commitment matters. That would leave us with the problems outlined above. Reality is too complicated to collapse the tension between these two things. Can we live in the tension, without having to “best” our interlocutors?
I’m not sure which came first, Protestantism or Modernity. Either way, we have to be careful about the assumptions that we make. Here, the simple question of infant Baptism opened up a whole can of worms. But I hope that this can of worms was helpful to you in answering questions other than the question of infant Baptism. What a difference it makes when we recognize this “something that comes before” and stop thinking that we determine reality. This something that comes before is actually Someone who comes before, who calls to us insistently, “Come, follow me.”