When I was doing full-time parish ministry, one of my favorite activities was performing baptisms. Now that I’m a bishop, I have fewer occasion to baptize, and I do miss it. But an exception took place recently when I was delighted to welcome into the Church Hazel Rose Cummins, the daughter of Doug Cummins and his wife Erica. Doug is our associate producer for Word on Fire in Santa Barbara.
I would like to share with all of you what I preached to the group gathered outside (it’s COVID time) San Roque Church in Santa Barbara. I asked them if they had heard the story of Father Matthew Hood, a priest of the Archdiocese of Detroit, who discovered, after watching a video of his own baptism, that he had been invalidly baptized. The deacon who had performed the ceremony did not use the proper words, and as a result, Father Hood had not in fact been received into the Church. As a consequence, he had not validly received First Communion, confirmation or priestly ordination, since all of those sacraments depend upon the legitimacy of baptism. Once this was discovered, the Archbishop of Detroit administered all of the sacraments to Father Hood and the young man was able to minister as a priest.
You may think, “Well, that’s a strange story with a happy ending,” but it tells us, in fact, something extremely important regarding the Church’s understanding of baptism. We believe that through the words and gestures of the sacrament, something happens. Baptism is not simply a celebration of a new life, or even an act of praying for and offering a child to God. It is the visible sign of the invisible grace of incorporation into the Mystical Body of Jesus. It changes an objective state of affairs, whether we acknowledge it or not.
I then used the parable of the eagle’s egg that tumbled out of the nest only to fall amid a flock of chickens. When the eaglet was hatched, the only world he came to know was that of chickens, and he spent his first years pecking on the ground and never spreading his great wings. One day, a majestic eagle flew overhead and spotted his young confrere on the ground, acting like a chicken. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “Don’t you know who you are?” He then taught the eaglet how to deploy his wings and soar.
So it goes in the spiritual order. Every baptized person is, objectively speaking, a child of God and destined to be a great saint. The problem is, most of those who have received this new identity promptly forget it and take on the beliefs and practices of the world. Following the prompts of popular culture and secularist ideologues, we give ourselves over to the acquisition of wealth or power or material success or fame. These things aren’t bad in themselves, but considering them our highest value and running after them with all of our powers amounts to pecking on the ground like chickens. What we need, I told the congregation gathered for Hazel’s baptism, is a strong community of people to remind this little girl who she is. They didn’t make her a child of God; Christ did that through the mediation of baptism. But they can teach her not to settle for being some pathetic substitute of who she is meant to be. Everything they teach her, everything they encourage her to do, should be directed to the great end of becoming a saint.
I have sometimes wondered what this country would be like if everyone who is baptized lived up to his or her identity as a child of God. What if everyone who is meant to soar would, finally, stop poking around on the ground? It would be a true American revolution.
Bishop Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, online at www.wordonfire.org.