The Mercy of Baptism

He is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. (John 1:33)

St. John the Baptist washed sinners in the Jordan River. People came from all over the Holy Land to repent of their sins and receive John’s baptism.

Did St. John the Baptist invent baptism? Not exactly.

The ancient Temple in Jerusalem had water baths for pilgrims to cleanse themselves in. Ritual washing goes way back. Water cleanses our bodies. So the religions of mankind have added a spiritual dimension to this cleansing power. In other words, “baptism” is as old as the human race; St. John did not invent it.

But John did administer baptism to God Himself, the God-man Jesus Christ. Not because God needed cleansing. But because God wills to use water to baptize with the Holy Spirit, through His Church. Lord Jesus commissioned us to “go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

John said it: Christ baptizes not just with water, but with the Holy Spirit. Jesus pours out divine grace along with the water. So, yes: Catholic baptism is a religious cleansing ritual, similar to such washings in other religions. But that’s not all Catholic baptism is. Because here Christ acts through the ritual washing. God Himself produces invisible effects on the soul of the one baptized.

Jesus died and rose again for us, and He ascended into heaven. Through the sacrament of baptism, our High Priest applies to the baptized person the fruits of that mystery. Christ makes a Christian, a new anointed one. He unites the baptized person to Himself. Baptism cleanses us of sin. But the “cleanness” brought about by Christian baptism involves more than just pardon for personal sins. It involves unbreakable solidarity with Jesus Christ. In Baptism, Christ marks the soul with a permanent character. He “brands” the soul, so to speak, as belonging to Him.

Now, God possesses a firmness and permanence beyond what we can even imagine. We think of mountain ranges and vast oceans as being permanent fixtures, but they have nothing on the permanence of God. We also have a tendency to think that everything depends on us clever human beings. But it doesn’t. God works effects through His sacraments, effects that go beyond what we can understand. Baptism means God uniting Himself with us on His terms, not ours. As St. Paul puts it, “God must prove true, even if all men are fickle.” (Romans 3:4)

If you pay attention to the Catholic press, you may know that lately various prelates and ecclesiastical big-wigs have emphasized the importance of “pastoral accompaniment.” We need to accompany everyone with supportive love, regardless of whether we approve or disapprove of how they behave.

To understand this, I think we need to meditate on what God affirms when He pours out the Holy Spirit on us in the sacrament of Baptism. He assures us: I made you in the beginning, and I made you out of love. I made you to reign in happy blessedness, as a member of the divine household. The nonsense of this world does not control your destiny. I will only good for you. I have a detailed plan for your life, which leads ultimately to heaven.

This doesn’t mean that baptized people can’t wind up in hell. You or I could wind up in hell tomorrow, if we don’t watch our p’s and q’s. Our choices have consequences. God’s law binds. The Lord does not lower His expectations of the morals of those He unites with Himself through baptism; he raises those expectations. God help anyone who knowingly chooses to break God’s law.

But if we think that Christianity simply means: “me being a good person,” we have missed it altogether. Because we are not good people.

Christ came to save us because we are sinners. We’re sinners who all deserve to go to hell. As St. John Paul II put it, in his encyclical on Christian morals:

No human effort, not even the most rigorous observance of the commandments, succeeds in…rendering God the worship due to Him…This fulfillment can come only from a gift of God. (Veritatis Splendor 11)

God loves sinners who deserve to go to hell. He died for sinners who deserve to go to hell. He came to affirm the truths that He affirms through the sacrament of baptism: Sinner, I love you. Sinner, I made you for happiness and glory. Sinner, I have a plan for you.

“Pastoral accompaniment” hardly means just chumming around and ignoring the Ten Commandments. Hanging out and talking sports hardly counts as “evangelization.” Much as I personally enjoy doing it. We can’t hide the fact that the Gospel of Jesus Christ makes very challenging demands on us, precisely in order to help us find true happiness.

But we also can’t forget that all human beings fundamentally stand on the same footing before God–namely that His mercy can and does overcome all our evil. When we baptized people know we have done wrong, we can get right again by going to “second baptism,” also known as…confession. We can go again and again, because God never tires of forgiving.

Christ’s infinite and omnipotent mercy really is the pre-eminent power that reigns in the Church. Which is because, when everything is said and done, His infinite, omnipotent mercy is the pre-eminent power that reigns over all things.

So let’s help each other, and let’s help everyone we know, respond humbly to that bounteous divine love.

Morality How To’s

I prayed and pleaded, and wisdom came to me. (Wisdom 7:7)

Pope St. John Paul II wrote that Christ invites all of us to follow Him, just as He invited the Rich Young Man: Keep the Commandments. Give what you have to the poor, so that you will have treasure in heaven. And follow me.

Christ invites all of us to follow Him in this way. And by accepting this invitation, we can find what we call morality. We can live moral lives, upright lives.

Let’s focus on this crucial point. We cannot imagine that we are morally good first–and because we are so good, we get to be Jesus’ friends. No.

The Son of God—the Way, the Truth, and the Life—invites us to follow Him, and by following Him, we find out what “being good” actually means. By following Him, by making a purifying pilgrimage in His footsteps, by spending a lifetime studying Christ, so as to know Him, love Him, and imitate Him—in other words, by co-operating with Him, we can find the peace of a clear conscience.

Who doesn’t want to have a peaceful conscience? The kind of conscience that rests, and allows you to delight in simple pleasures, to listen to other people when they talk to you, to sleep well, to enjoy a baseball playoff game. If we really want to come to full-flower as people, we need untroubled consciences.

More than a hamburger, or a Ferrari, or a good-looking boyfriend or girlfriend–what we really want, above all, is the inner peace that comes from honesty and harmony with what is right. The Holy Catholic Church says: We can have this, provided we start by focusing our eyes on Jesus Christ Himself.

Not focusing on the Bible, per se—though of course we can’t focus our eyes on Christ without reading the Scriptures.

Not focusing on ‘moral positions’ in themselves. Though of course the Church takes moral positions, based on the life and teachings of Christ our Lord.

Not even focusing on the Pope or the Church Herself as an institution. After all, what is the first sentence of Pope Francis’ letter about the Joy of the Gospel? It is not, “The joy of the Gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter me.” No: Pope Francis’ fundamental idea is: The joy of the Gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter…

Jesus.

So, three steps to morality:

1. Faith and prayer. We encounter Christ by faith, since He no longer dwells visibly on earth. We want peaceful consciences? Then let’s regularly do calisthenics of faith.

–Prayer to Christ first thing in the morning and the last thing at night.

–“Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner,” all day long. Let’s make a resolution to say, “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner,” more often than we look at our phones.

2. Receiving the sacraments as acts of Divine Mercy. Don’t get me wrong: A lot goes into having a beautiful, prayerful Mass. I certainly appreciate all the hard work that goes into it. I try myself to work hard to prepare. The Lord smiles on selfless Christians who volunteer to help at church.

But we have to remember always: Fundamentally, the Holy Mass is not us. If the Mass were just us, as Flannery O’Connor put it, “then to hell with it.” The Mass is: Jesus giving us Himself.
Which brings me to: Truly to experience the Holy Mass as an act of Divine Mercy means regularly experiencing the sacrament of Confession as an act of Divine Mercy.

“But, Father. I’m a good person. I don’t need to go to Confession!”

Really?

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been too long since my last Confession. I am one stubborn, proud, ungrateful wretch—who tends to forget how Jesus shed a lot of blood, and endured excruciating agony, and it wasn’t just for all the other people.

3. Which brings us to the final point I would like to try to make. Love. Morality really does fundamentally mean loving—loving God and loving other people. Love really is the law. That particular liberal shibboleth is actually true.

But the love in question, of course, is the love that proceeds from the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the love that sees with Christ’s eyes. And we know that Christ hardly looks at sins being committed and says, “That’s fine.”

No. The Lord Jesus knew that the Rich Young Man in the gospel needed to change his life.

Christ saw the sinner, and loved him, and invited him: Come, sinner, follow me. I will teach you how to do good.

Humbling and Impossible

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. (Mark 10:25)

One school of interpretation has it that the “eye of the needle” to which our Lord refers in this simile is a very low gate in the ancient wall of Jerusalem, the only gate that was kept open at night. An armed guard would stand watch at this gate. He would allow a mounted man through, provided the rider identified himself as a citizen or a friend. To pass through the low gate, however, his camel would have to kneel down and crawl.

Apparently, this nighttime gate may sometimes have been called “the eye of the needle.” Thus, the Lord Jesus’ audience could have thought of a kneeling, crawling camel, humbly bowing low to enter the city, when they heard His simile about the rich entering the kingdom of God.

Valentine’s Day Advice and Veritatis Splendor

Am I going to see “The Rite?” Absolutely not. I watched “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” back in 2005, and I haven’t really had a good night’s sleep since.

But there’s an idea for you, Cassanovas. Rent “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” for Valentine’s Day and watch it with your main squeeze. That will be romantic for you, voluptuaries!

…One thing I wasn’t able to mention earlier (because I was too busy scrubbing pots): In my humble opinion, the Well Fargo Center in Minneapolis evokes the Empire State Building in a splendid postmodern way. Agree/disagree, architecture buffs?

…Anyway, if you heard the words of Jesus Ben-Sirach in church this morning, you probably thought of Part I of Chapter 2 of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor. Here is a summary of paragraphs 38-41:

God left man in the power of his own counsel. (Sirach 15:14)

We are all kings or queens, because we have dominion over our own actions.

Sixteen Years of Splendor

Dear reader, you will have to forgive me for being almost a fortnight late.

On August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ, we marked the sixteenth anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor.

Veritatis Splendor considered the basics of Christian morals. The encyclical affirms that some acts are prohibited by God; there can never be a good reason to do them.

(If you have to ask what these things are, let me answer by saying: “They are exactly what your grandmother would have said they are.”)

The Pope explained Veritatis Splendor with these words:

The good of the person lies in being in the Truth and in doing the Truth.

This essential bond of Truth-Good-Liberty is largely lost in contemporary culture.

Therefore today it is one of the proper tasks of the mission of the Church to lead people back to seeing this union.

The Law of God is not our enemy. We cannot do whatever we want, but we can and must do whatever is good for us. We are truly free when we obey God.

The encyclical is based on the following event, narrated in the Gospel:

A rich young man came to the Lord Jesus and asked Him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

The Lord told him to keep the Ten Commandments. Then He invited the pious young man to follow Him.

Christ and the Rich Young Ruler by Heinrich Hofmann

Jesus Christ IS the Law of God. Through the sacraments of the Church, He gives us the grace to obey Him–and to be truly free.

Retiring These…New Bests Above

Best Movie Villain Ever: Darth Vader

Best Chewing Gum:
Wrigley Doublemint

Best Single-Malt Scotch: Lagavulin

Best Plate of Pasta: Spagetti Carbonara

Best Skyscraper: Chrysler Building

Best Pet: None

Best Neil Diamond Song: Sweet Caroline

Best Comic Relief in the History of Theater: When Constable Elbow and Froth enter Angelo’s court in Act II, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure

Best John Paul II Encyclical:
Fides et Ratio

second best: Evangelium Vitae

third best: Veritatis Splendor

fourth best: Redemptor Hominis