Tag: baptism

Superstitious practices tell God what he can and cannot do (and it’s not just for trads)

Last week we celebrated the feast of St. Joseph, and I found myself thinking about all the little resin St. Josephs scattered across this country. The poor guys are just hanging around upside down with a faceful of dirt, saying hello to passing worms, waiting to be remembered and dug up.

They are part of “home selling kits” that consist of a crudely crafted St. Joseph statue and a card with a specific prayer. Burying the statue upside down, some Catholics believe, will help them buy or sell their house.

This practice is a superstition, and superstition is explicitly named as a sin by the Catholic Church. Yes, even if you do it gently and don’t scowl and shake a fist at the statue before you bury him, and even if you pray to God to get you a good deal on your home. You can pray to God through the intercession of St. Joseph for a speedy sale; just keep his statue on the mantel.

Superstitious practices are prohibited, in part, because they “attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand,” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The church today is rife with superstitious thinking. I didn’t grow up with the St. Joseph statue tradition, but I certainly read stories about great sinners who wore a brown scapular because they believed it would save them from hell no matter what they did.

I was at a baptism last Sunday. I heard only bits and pieces of the rite of baptism, but I was still suddenly gripped by a tremendous thrill, realizing I was present to witness a real, powerful, ineradicable change taking place in the soul of the little one whose tiny bald head I could barely see. I wanted to get up and cheer, but instead, I thanked God for doing what he does.

Then some sullen shadow passed a wing over my thoughts, and I recalled how many times I’ve heard the complaint that the “novus ordo” baptism just doesn’t have the same oomph as the extraordinary form. The older form has more references to exorcising the devil and sometimes involves blessed salt, and it is therefore allegedly more powerful.

How could it be more powerful than what just happened, I wondered? This little baby just went from death to life, from dark to light, from drowning to rescue, from burial to resurrection. I believe this. This is our faith. What more could there possibly be?

I want to return to that question, but not before I say two things.

One is that superstition is something more than overtly pagan practices like putting your faith in a lucky rabbit’s foot or doing some quasi-religious ceremony like burying a statue. And it’s more than treating a scapular like a magic charm. Superstition can happen even in outwardly liturgically sound sacramental practices like baptism. Asserting that one rite of baptism is more powerful than another is claiming that we can lure or manipulate God into doing things he wouldn’t otherwise do…Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.

Image: Detail of St. Joseph statue via Wikimedia commons

Baptized, confirmed, and ordained in two weeks: My interview with Fr. Matt Hood

For a man who had just been baptized, confirmed, ordained and catapulted into the headlines in the space of two weeks, the Rev. Matt Hood of St. Lawrence Parish in Utica, Mich., sounded remarkably relaxed. I caught the 30-year-old priest on the phone while he and his father drove to Minnesota, where they were going to pick up a puppy named Sherman.

Father Hood’s story is no shaggy dog tale, though. It was only a few weeks ago that he discovered by chance that his baptism in 1990 was not valid, and therefore neither was his ordination in 2017 nor were many of the sacraments he presided over in the past three years, when he thought he was a priest but was not.

Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron of Detroit issued a letter on Aug. 22 informing his flock that in light of a recent statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Father Hood’s baptism and ordination had been invalid because the presiding deacon at his baptism in infancy had said, “We baptize you” rather than “I baptize you.” Once that was discovered, the archbishop explained, Father Hood had been properly baptized, confirmed and then ordained as a deacon and a priest.

Father Hood’s situation has been remedied, but the revelation of his invalid baptism and speculation about what that means for all the people he interacted with as a priest, are still rippling outward. This record of our conversation, which continued over Facebook, has been shortened and lightly edited.

Read the rest of my interview with Fr. Matt Hood in America Magazine.

Why we can’t have baptisms during Lent

Did you just have a baby?  Did you call the rectory to schedule a baptism? Did they tell you you’ll have to wait, because they don’t do baptisms during Lent?

At first, this may not make sense to you, but I assure you, there is a very good reason for this policy.  You see . . .

Lent is all about acknowledging our fallen nature and appealing to the Holy Spirit for help in conquering sin. Lent is about remembering that sin has wounded and weakened us, and that we are in desperate need of God’s grace and salvation. We can gain this grace by engaging in ancient practices which engage both the body and the spirit, and we emerge refreshed and reunited with God, humbly giving thanks for His mercy and salvation.

Baptism, on the other hand, is all about acknowledging our fallen nature and appealing to the Holy Spirit for help in conquering sin. Baptism is about remembering that sin has wounded and weakened us, and that we are in desperate need of God’s grace and salvation. We can gain this grace by engaging in ancient practices which engage both the body and the spirit, and we emerge refreshed and reunited with God, humbly giving thanks for His mercy and salvation.

So that’s why we can’t have baptisms during Lent. It just wouldn’t make sense.

How to Choose the Right Godparent: Baptisms can bring fallen away Catholics back to the faith

Ms. Nelson often has the unpleasant task of telling parents they cannot honor friends with the godparent role because they are not Catholic or because they are in an invalid marriage.

“No one gets involved in church ministry because they want to make people unhappy,” Ms. Nelson said. “It’s very difficult. If this person is taking tentative steps [toward the church] and is hit with obstacles, he’s going to say, ‘Why did I bother?’ and give up. And then I’ll think it’s my fault he’s turned away from Jesus.”

She tries to present the church’s teaching on godparents as a positive opportunity rather than a list of rules. “But sometimes the rules bring people back,” Ms. Nelson said.

Read the rest of my latest for America magazine.

Photo “Double Baptism” by Maria Eklind via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Napoleon at the baptismal font

There’s really no sense in saying, “I’m interested in Christ, but only a little bit, please.” You gotta go all in.

So where do Napoleon and his crown-grabbing ways fit it? Well, I have seen a good number of Catholics who strongly identify with Catholicism and are heavily involved with other Catholics. The drive and hunger is there. But as soon as it comes time to kneel and accept something good and meaningful from God, they don’t just gleefully, joyfully go for it. Instead, they grab it out of his hands and bestow it on themselves.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

Image: Marie-Victoire Jaquotot [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons)

Learning to live as a baptized person

It was a kindly old priest in Coke bottle glasses, a matter-of-fact French Canadian servant of God with no desire to act as Grand Inquisitor. But his simple, basic questions did the job they were intended to do: They let us know that this was real, this was serious, and our responsibility was not going to go away.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

This and that, baby pics, and a baptism!

Today, I hope to get caught up on emails. I’m sorry to say I pretty much gave up responding to anyone sometime in the third trimester, and Corrie is now 9 weeks old, so that’s . . . a lot of emails.  So if you wrote to me, thanks for being patient!

corrie and dora 1

Who’s a patient email correspondent?

Who's a patient email correspondent? You are! Oh yes, you are!

You are! Oh yes, you are!

We’re right in the middle of “something every weekend” season — confirmation, baptism, birthday parties galore, graduations, concerts, and a bunch of things I’m forgetting.

corrie tmnt

and other important pursuits

Thank goodness we have no athletic ability in this family. We did a few months of T-ball one year, and now we’re all fine, thanks.

We told everyone the baptism was after the 11:15 Mass, so our families left early and rushed around to get there in time (some are several hours away). So 12:15 comes and goes, the church empties out, and I’m sitting there with the baby in her gown, thinking, “If I got the day wrong, I’m going to sink into the ground.” My sister-in-law already took an extra day off a few weeks ago because we told her the wrong date, and the week after that, we told my mother-in-law the wrong location for our daughter’s confirmation!

So I grab the pastor, and he doesn’t know, but he says he thinks there’s first communion practice, but baptisms are usually at 1:00. He texts the deacon, then leaves on an emergency call. The kids go out to the the playground, the first communion class wanders in, I get even more nervous, not least because there is about forty pounds of lasagna slowly drying out at home, and who will eat it if there’s no baptism?  Then the deacon rushes up and I grab him, and he says yes, there is are four baptisms, today, but who are all these other people? I tell him about the first communion class. He works out an arrangement with the DRE, and I marvel that they are able to coordinate everything.

He says darkly, “Sometimes, it doesn’t get coordinated.” So the upshot is, pray for our deacons and priests and catechists! Even if they had an easy job spiritually, which they don’t, the sheer logistics of getting everybody sacramented up is going to kill them.

Here are a few pics of the baptism and one of Uncle Joey and the cousin jubilee on the trampoline afterward. Sorry they’re stuck together! I’m gonna leave them like this, rather than fight with the computer for another forty minutes.  Happy rebirth day, dear baby!

corrie baptism 1corrie baptism 2corrie baptism 3corrie baptism 4

Obedience Gives Us Jesus

Icon_of_jesus_baptism

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons 

Why tell us that Jesus is the Son of God as soon as He does the one thing that the Son of God doesn’t really need to do? What does this tell us?

Read the rest at the Register.

I have a job for you, baby.

Not the little guy who just kicked me for the first time, that I could feel, just yesterday (yay!). I mean the other one, the one I lost. I wrote about how hard it was not to have a body to bury. You want to be able to take care of your children with your own hands, but I couldn’t do that, and it hurt.

Now, as the months have gone by and the pain of loss has receded, I still find myself bewildered about what to do with the baby’s soul.

When I found out I was pregnant last time, I prayed for the baby’s protection constantly, and turned him over to God. So I have a strong hope that, whenever it was that he left us, he was already baptized through our desire and intention to do so, and he went straight into the arms of his loving Papa in heaven. This is a good thing! I am not worried.  I love him, but God loves him more.

But, what to do when I pray for my all children, one by one? I was never sure when I got to this child. It didn’t feel right to pray for him. Even though I know no prayer is wasted, it seemed like asking for something that was already given.

And I know that many parents pray to their lost unborn babies, and that seemed reasonable, but felt odd, too. Probably this shows that I have a poor understanding of the saints in heaven, but praying to him felt like turning him into a spiritual being, which made him foreign, elevated beyond the family, not really our kid; and at the same time, it felt like too much to ask of such a little guy. I’m not going to tell my five-year-old when Daddy is having a hard time at work or Mama is worried about school; so why would I spill the beans to a seven-week-old fetus, even if he is enjoying the Beatific Vision? I know, I’m over thinking it, but it just felt weird!

But yesterday, it came to me: Baby, you pray for the new baby. You two hold hands and be good to each other. Take care of each other while Mama is taking care of the rest of them. Aha! Everybody needs a job. We are at our best when we know what we are here for.