Product Recall on Catholic Baptism

Public service announcement: If you happened to have received a baptism by one Rev. Andres Arango in the Diocese of Phoenix prior to June 2021 and presumed your mortal soul was saved from the depths of hell, you might be entitled to a refund… if you haven’t died in the meantime, that is.

So what was wrong with these baptisms exactly?

Well, in a statement released by the Diocese of Phoenix, it turns out that Rev. Andres Arango rather clumsily used the wrong words when baptism people, and apparently Almighty God was unable to work out exactly what was going on and honor it despite the priest’s failure to flawlessly deliver the sacrament word-for-word.

Here’s what the Diocese had to say:

Whatever Rev. Andres Arango was saying wrong was obviously noticed and corrected on the 17th June 2021. Thank God for that. For everyone else, I’m sorry you will have to get re-baptized using the right words.

This is not a joke

When I first read about this, I thought I was reading a satirical piece, and I obligingly chuckled along. At some point, though, it hit me: Wait a second… This is not a joke.

The Catholics seriously believe that God is incapable of honoring someone’s sincere commitment to their faith because the priest got a few words of the liturgy wrong? Apparently so.

In fact, this is not the first time this has happened.

Back in 2020, Father Matthew Hood, associate pastor of St. Lawrence Parish in Utica, was innocently watching a video of his own baptism from way back in the nineties and discovered, much to his horror, that instead of using the Catholic church’s ancient liturgical formula — “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” — the presiding priest unforgivably uttered, “We baptize you….”

Apparently, this innocuous slip-of-the-tongue was enough to render Father Hood’s baptism invalid. Not only that, because the sacraments of confirmation and holy orders can only be conferred upon validly baptized Catholics, Father Hood was “devastated” to learn that not only was he not baptized or confirmed, but he also was not a validly-ordained priest. Therefore, the many others that Father Hood has gone on to baptize may have also received an invalid baptism, unleashing a chain of ‘would-be-Catholics’ who don’t even realize that God doesn’t recognize their baptism… apparently.

The Catholic church then began frantically conducting its own contact-tracing exercise, trying to track down anyone who might have received a dodgy baptism — in the hope that they might be able to correct the error before anyone dies and comes face-to-face with the Catholic God who is obviously beholden to the traditions of men.

“There was definitely shock and sadness at finding out 30 years later that I was never baptized. It was an alienating sense that even though I was following the Lord, I wasn’t a Christian, and I wasn’t a priest, and I wasn’t a deacon,” Father Hood told the Detroit Catholic, the online news outlet of the Archdiocese of Detroit.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

There is actually a priest who suddenly believes that he is not a priest anymore because, when he was baptized 30 years ago, there was one, single, solitary misspoken word in the Catholic liturgy for Baptism — the word “We,” instead of the word, “I” — and, because of that, his baptism is now null and void.

Even more shocking is that this priest actually believes that because his infant baptism was botched up to the tune of one, single, solitary word, he wasn’t even a ‘real’ Christian from that time to the present day — some thirty years. If that is indeed the case, then thank God this priest didn’t die during that time, or I’m sure that God would have mercilessly thrown his pitiful soul into the bowels of hell for all eternity — all because of one single word being wrong — and punished him all the more for being utterly oblivious to the fact for the past thirty years.

Give God some credit

At the risk of alienating my Catholic friends, I preface the following with an apology to you. I confess that I do not understand the nuances of the Catholic faith since I was raised as a good Evangelic boy and continued merrily down that path until I came to my senses in my late thirties.

However, I still believe in a God who is loving, compassionate, merciful, and kind, and that is why I can’t be part of a church that honestly believes that God would refuse to recognize the salvation of a person on account of a man-made liturgy being spoken incorrectly. Give God some credit. If he really is as good as Christians say he is, then I’m absolutely positive he can overlook such a mistake — if indeed one could call it that.

Baptism is not an incantation or a magic spell that must be spoken word-for-word to do the trick. Real, true baptism is an outward expression of what has already occurred in one’s own heart. It is an acknowledgment of the complete work of Christ that does not require people to “get it right” to become part of God’s “in crowd.” One does not need to utter the correct words in the correct order to appease God because God is not so easily fooled. God looks straight into the heart.

Not so — according to Father Stephen Pullis, Director of Evangelization and Missionary Discipleship for the Archdiocese of Detroit. “When someone is baptized, it’s not just a symbol or recognition of something that’s already happened. It’s actually making a change in the person,” Father Pullis said. “Because the sacraments actually bring about an effect, we have to be very precise in both the words, the form, and the matter, the objects, that we use. That means we have to do it in the way the church tells us to do it,” He continued.

Let that sink in.

This is yet another example of the theology of the church denying the reality of life. Some of the most truly horrible people I know have been baptized using the correct “formula,” according to church tradition. Yet, the redemptive work of baptism didn’t seem to penetrate their own skin and reach the part of a person that genuinely needs to be changed — the heart. In fact, it didn’t make any change whatsoever in the person. So let us not pretend that the very act of baptism actually changes a person by virtue of the act alone.

Surely a person’s actions and how they live their lives and love others betray their true beliefs. Why would God — knowing everything that God knows — acknowledge the ‘hoops of performance-based religion’ that a church forces its adherents to jump through — and ignore the true state of a person’s heart? So if Father Matthew Hood truly loves God and loves other people — which one would hope would be the case, given that he has lived his life as a priest — then surely that is enough for God.

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This post was previously published on Backyard Church.

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