Pints With Aquinas - Can I baptize a baby on the sly? | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: October 14, 2023

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Hello, my name is Fr. Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph and this is Pines with Aquinas. In this episode I want to ask what may seem to you like a silly question, but which is a question St. Thomas Aquinas asked and answered, namely whether you can baptize a child against the will of the child's parents. And that might seem like a silly curiosity, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, which I would submit to you is not a silly curiosity, but moving on. But it also reveals something about the dispensation of salvation, which helps us to live our lives in the setting

of God's providence, abandoned to his good goodwill. So I think it's worth asking, so let's get after it. Here we go. Okay, at the beginning of the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas says that he's going to get rid of all unnecessary questions or useless repetitions because he's read the theology textbook of his day and he's found that they can be burdensome or at the very least they can be trying of one's patience. So he's going to arrange sacred theology in a meaningful order, which corresponds to the order of God's revelation and grace, so that we can enter in. And he's just going to kind of pare it down. That might sound ironic to you when you look at the Summa Theologiae on the shelf. It's a big old book. Here's my one volume

Summa Theologiae in Latin. It's a decent sized book. Look at that. My automatic focus was not totally bewildered by that experience. Cheers. But this particular question St. Thomas actually asks twice in almost exactly the same terms. So either he forgot that he had answered it already or he thought it was so cool that he answered it twice. But again, alright, the question is whether you can baptize an infant of non-Christian parents without the permission of the aforementioned parents. And it gets into some interesting conflicts when we think about it in terms of what's at stake and how are we going to attain the aforementioned things that are at stake.

Because on the one hand, we as Christians have a strong sense of the necessity of baptism, right? When we think about necessity for salvation, we think, you know, like if you're gonna be saved you're gonna be saved by Christ in his church and the ordinary means whereby one comes into the communion of the church in relationship with Christ is through baptism. So we talk about baptism as necessary for salvation. Now mind you, God is not bound to the sacraments and people can participate in sacramental graces even without receiving the actual sacramental form. So St. Thomas

will talk about baptism of what we call desire or like baptism of blood. So like a catechumen for instance on the way to the Easter vigil might be said to participate the grace of baptism if he were killed in a car accident or the martyr who dies for belief, for faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, even without receiving baptism, though, you know, he didn't tend to receive baptism in due course, were he to survive, we could say that that person might participate in the grace of the sacrament as well. So yes, so like the graces themselves aren't bound to the sacraments, are limited to the

sacraments, but they are stably associated with the sacraments. They are dispensed ordinarily by the sacraments. Okay, so that's what we're thinking about. On the one hand, baptism is super important. It's necessary for salvation. But on the other hand, the parents retain their parental rights. So God in his providence has it such that this child is born to these parents. That's not a mistake.

That's not an accident. That's not something that God failed to foresee. That's not something that God forgot. Okay, so this child is born to these parents, and these parents aren't Christian, and these parents might not have the intention of converting to the faith anytime soon, or being received into communion anytime soon, and so they're not going to have this child baptized, at least not in the near term. So these parents retain their parental rights.

There is a kind of integrity to nature, which St. Thomas recognizes at various turns. And you can think about how he describes the integrity of the natural virtues. Like when you acquire a virtue, it's a virtue, right? It's not necessarily the fullness of virtue, or it's not necessarily the perfection of virtue in a non-Christian individual or in a person who doesn't partake of the grace of Christ. So we talk about like virtuous pagans or virtuous heathens, I think, in the less well-adjusted terminology. But yet there's a real integrity to that virtue. They can do some things with their virtues if they've acquired a kind of temperance or a kind of fortitude or a kind of justice, even a kind of prudence, right? Now when charity is bestowed on an individual, then that goes and raises the whole virtuous life

to its kind of final perfection, which is for the love of God and neighbor, because it partakes of that love of God. So it's able to draw out from the native excellence of all the other virtues something more and to super add or to bestow something further. Okay, so Father Gregory, get back to that matter at hand. Okay, so on the one hand we're talking about the necessity of salvation, but on the other hand we're talking about parental rights. How do we thread the needle? Well, St. Thomas says ordinarily, no, you wouldn't baptize these children. And he gives some reasons as to why you wouldn't baptize these children because it undermines the natural authority of the parents. Okay, so in this world, the world in which we live in,

I think that's from like a James Bond theme song, regardless. Okay, so in this world, there are various kind of intermediate institutions, for lack of a better term, but various social and political units. You think here of like the family, the polity, the church. Each has its proper integrity and each has its own kind of authority. And so within the setting of the family, the parents have authority as those who have brought the children into existence or those who have concreated with God. And so there's a natural authority given the relationships which constitute that family life and ordinarily, you know, like grace perfects nature.

It doesn't destroy it. So it wouldn't be like, all right, this grace thing is super important so it's just going to set nature aside. No, like grace is a principle of healing and growing nature, not of totally replacing nature or of supplanting nature. So you'll often hear that repeated in these types of conversations. So same time it says, no, we're not going to baptize this child ordinarily because it undermines the natural authority of the parents. But also he says, like, think about it. What's the likelihood that this child is going to be raised in the faith? Probably pretty low.

Yeah, in fact, very low, because the child is ordinarily raised by its parents. The parents don't profess the faith. They don't believe. They don't, you know, they haven't bought in, and so they're not going to be motivated or animated in raising this child Christian. So you might say, oh, well, like the grace poured into his heart by baptism will conduct him through the affair. Maybe, but also maybe not. And, you know, like the church, in her wisdom, she has the parents and the godparents bring the child to the font to ensure that the child will be, one, baptized in the faith of the parents, right, like baptized in the faith of the church represented by those who have gathered around the font, but also too raised, you know, like educated in the faith of the church. And if the ordinary

means for that aren't present, like if the stable relationships which would mediate that aren't present, then we can't say, well, you know, like as if by magic, because that's kind of wishful thinking or even magical thinking. Now, other considerations. In danger of death, yes, you would baptize an infant. And that's for everybody. That's for bishops, priests, deacons, laypersons, even non-believers. All that you need is to pour true water over the head of the child and say, I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit while intending what the church

intends. Okay, so that's all that's required. So in the case of danger of death, yes. And that's also true for adults, provided that an adult hasn't expressed a contrary intention to, you know, reception of baptism and that, you know, like this person will have expressed some desire for baptism. You know, like we want them to have belief in the treatise on faith. When St. Thomas talks about belief, he says, what do you have to believe in? Well, that God exists and that he rewards those who seek him. That's how it's stated in Hebrews 11.6.

And he associates this with the existence of God and the providence of God, which he further associates with the triune God and the incarnate Lord. So we're looking for some kind of faith, and he gets into details of implicit and explicit and that's probably beyond the competence of this video or beyond the scope of this video I should say. And so you want like the person to believe because a person is saved by something you know like the person is saved by Christ in his church in the offer of revelation and grace. And so baptism is a way by which to meet that faith with what perfects it, namely the bestowal of grace with charity, which ultimately justifies.

So, the sacraments, right, they're not magic. And I think that that's something that we can be more clear on, or something that we can, clearer I suppose would be the appropriate way to say that word, something that we can be clearer on, or something that we can clearer, I suppose would be the appropriate way to say that word, something that we can be clearer on, or something that we need to address in some of our own patterns of thought. Because, and I mean this sincerely, you know, like the sacraments, they're not magic. They require that we approach with faith. We'll often talk about them as sacraments of faith. So like the faith of the community, but also the faith of the individual, of the recipient. Baptism, specifically the baptism of infants, it's a peculiar situation because you can be baptized in the faith of the church and you know, like you can be baptized in the faith of your

parents by extension. But you know, like for the rest of us, we have to have some faith. We have to approach the sacrament with some faith, even if that's thin, right? Or even if that's not especially substantial. So what this brings before my mind and why I think it's a cool question to ask and an important question to ponder is that in in the life of faith there aren't shortcuts. Now mind you, God in His condescension, in His loving-kindness, bestows upon us every imaginable good gift, right? He gives us grace sufficient to come to knowledge of Him and to profess that, you know, to profess that belief and to receive this influx of charity

whereby we are justified and ultimately sanctified unto heaven. So God gives us every good and perfect gift. And yes, so like we say, 1st Timothy 2, 4, God desires that all be saved and come to knowledge of the truth. So he proves himself generous, He proves himself constant. Um, but again, the dispensation of salvation, it doesn't admit of shortcuts. It's not like just as soon as we just do this, or just as soon as we just do that. It's just as soon as we just do that. Like, I mean, it's, it's always going to be difficult. And GK Chesterton gets at this in a beautiful way in orthodoxy, where

he describes how as a child, one of his favorite passages from any book was the passage in Robinson Crusoe where Robinson Crusoe washes up on the shore of the island and with him there are any number of articles which had been on the ship and he says in looking at that list of articles and that like that inventory I found it to be the most beautiful poem because each thing was ideal inso far as historically speaking, it could have been lost. Like it could have been lost in the sea. And so he says, you know, in my own free time, I look around my room and I see

each individual item as ideal because it could have been lost. And what he's talking about is in our own lives, like each of us could have been lost and if we are to be saved, we're to be saved from a wreck. Like each of us has had this hair breath's escape, he says. Those of us who have been baptized, those of us who partake of the divine life, and those of us who seek to heal and grow by its gracious assistance. So like the Church will be saved, the Church will be perfected, the Church will be cleansed and purified just as soon as we live our Christian lives. But that's tough, that's hard, right? There's no shortcuts and it's not going to

be done by magic. So it's always going to involve administration of the sacraments and preaching and teaching. It's always going to involve the ongoing work of conversion. It's always going to involve penance. It's always going to involve friendship, relationship, Christian community. It's always going to involve the messiness of life. And there's no way around that. I just don't know of any way around that, I should say. Maybe there is, but it hasn't yet been revealed to me or bestowed upon me. So, in the garden, you know, when our first parents were created, they were created in the life of grace. And in the ordinary course, were they to have reproduced in that state of grace, their children would have been conceived with grace.

Not in that it was like a birthright in the strict sense, but God in infusing the human soul would have also bestowed grace, virtues, gifts of the Holy Spirit, and other things besides. But we sinned, and so we lost that rectitude, that original justice, which would have carried with it this promise of ongoing sanctification from generation to generation. And so now, if we are to be saved, we are to be saved from a wreck. And we're to be saved one by one in relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ and friendship with our Lord Jesus Christ. And we as a Christian community testify to that fact and we also invite others

into it, into the reality itself, because we can be associated with Christ in this announcement. We can be made instruments of His saving mercy. So yeah, I say it's worthwhile to banish the thought that, you know, like wishful thinking or magical thinking will get us what we need. When truth be told, like what we need is to convert, you know, like we need to believe and to confess the faith and we need to work in accord with the grace that God gives, that is to say consent to it and cooperate with it such that it might be magnified in our lives and potentially touch the lives of those whom we meet. So it turns out a theologically obscure point ends up yielding much in the way of enlightenment and encouragement.

That's what I hope to share. This is Pius the Aquinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel, push the bell, and get other email updates when cool things come out. Also I contribute to a podcast called God Splending with four of the Dominican Friars. Two things about it. First is sweet content to be found at godsplending.org or whatever the podcast app or YouTube thing that you follow.

So check that out and subscribe to it and you'll get cool stuff. And then the other thing is we're having a young adult retreat at the beginning of November. So applications are still open for a hot second. So take advantage of that hot second and find your way to Malvern, Pennsylvania. That is Malvern Retreat House where we'll have a retreat for people aged 21 through 33. Email if you want an exception on the upper end. And it'll be called The Fullness of Truth.

We're going to be reading, put Ben to theVI's book, Truth and Tolerance, and talking about Christianity and Spiritualism, Christianity and Faith, Christianity and Truth, and then truth and tolerance and what that entails. So it's going to be a jammer. All right, that's what I got for you. Know of my prayers for you. Please pray for me, and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas.