In a recent comment on my review of CM Gschwandtner's Welcoming Finitude, Joseph Charles noted a preposterous story appearing in the Associated Press, which reported the possibility that some infants might not have validly received the sacrament of baptism because of an anomaly in the form of the sacrament ministered by a certain deacon who altered the language "I baptize" to "We baptize." Joseph appropriately dubbed this hilarity with the hilarious phrase, "sacramental slapstick." Now while Joseph's critique of Catholicism runs very deep and sharp, far more deeply and sharply than his detour through a modicum of levity (indeed, he might find more "slapstick" in what follows), it does serve to underscore what's been afoot in Catholic circles these days.
First, a little reassurance for the worried well: unless the deacon was a malicious and evil person---intending to defraud the church---then the sacrament is valid (even if liceity is put into question). To keep things simple, a review of the basic tenet of sacramental theology: a sacrament has a hylomorphic structure, that is, it is constructed of a form, in this case the words used in the ceremony/liturgy, and the matter, in this case, water. In the sacrament of baptism, the core of the form is "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," not "I/we" (which are always ambiguous). Moreover, any baptized Christian can baptize, so long as she does what the Church has always intended to do. Now if the deacon deliberately intended to do otherwise than what the Church has always done, there could be a problem with validity. The first-person pronoun's use here would not invalidate the sacrament in and of itself.
So just what has turned sacramental theology into low comedy's banana peel in the path of everyday Catholics? My surmise is the appearance of the ugly head of ultramontane fundamentalism slowly creeping into the life of the church. One needn't look too far to find well-meaning but misguided Catholics who have lost faith in Pope Francis because of his human frailties, as if the pope were himself the Church. When such fundamentalist Catholics put all their faith in a particular personage, it is easy to see how fragile such faith can become. Such faith has recourse only to dogma, and closes itself off to the living, breathing Catholic faith.
Such Catholics find reassurance in "knowing" just how many people are in hell, for example, and shiver in their boots at the suggestion that humans on earth cannot know the judgement of God at the end of any human life. It seems such people cannot have faith in their own 'heavenly reward' unless the reward of bad people is clearly stated, known and an incontrovertible fact. For such people, there can be no beatific vision without the music of the sizzling flesh of the damned.
Many such Catholics identify themselves as "traditional," and as such, embrace many Catholic devotions, such as the Tridentine Rite of the Mass. Truth be told, I personally have great admiration for the beauty and majesty of that rite; it is the rite of my own childhood. There is nothing in the 1962 missal that warrants the fundamentalism that slips on the banana peels of the "I/we," or the reluctance of a pope who is slow to judge.
Whatever happened to the notion of the indefectability of the church? Popes come and go, but nothing can militate against the abiding presence of Christ in the church. The 1962 missal has become a stumbling block, a wedge between Catholic and Catholic, a scandal that threatens to reduce ritual and liturgy to "slapstick," and fertile ground for the work of the devil's divisiveness. The blinding zeal of fundamentalism will undoubtedly lead to a blindness to banana peels. When did the likes of Jerry Lewis become papabile?
