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You’re meant to be an eagle, not a chicken: A reflection on Baptism

What would this country would be like if everyone who is baptized lived up to his or her identity as a child of God?

(CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)

When I was doing full-time parish ministry, one of my favorite activities was performing Baptisms. I put the word in the plural, for I hardly ever baptized one baby at a time, but usually ten or a dozen. Typically, the quite large group of family and friends would gather in the first several pews of St. Paul of the Cross Church about 2 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, I would welcome them and do a very short description of what was about to happen, and then the happy cacophony of twelve babies crying at once would inevitably commence. I would shout my way through the prayers and the Baptisms—and a general joyfulness would obtain.

Now that I’m a bishop, I have less occasion to baptize, and I do miss it. But an exception took place last week 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) of San Roque Church in Santa Barbara for the ceremony. I asked them if they had heard the story of Fr. Matthew Hood, a priest of the Detroit Archdiocese, 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, Fr. Hood had not in fact been received into the Church. And as a consequence of this, he had not validly received First Communion, Confirmation, or priestly ordination, since all of those sacraments depend upon the legitimacy of Baptism.

Now, once this was found out, the Archbishop of Detroit administered all of the relevant sacraments to Fr. Hood and the young man was able to minister as a priest. You might 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. If that’s all it is, to paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, the heck with it. It is, rather, 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.

Having said all of this, I then stressed what we might call the subjective side of Baptism. Since there were quite a few young people present, I used the well-worn parable of the eagle’s egg that tumbled out of the nest only to fall amidst a flock of chickens. When the eaglet was hatched, the only world he came to know was that of chickens, and hence he spent his first years pecking on the ground and never spreading his great wings. One day, I continued, 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, divinized, and destined to be a great saint. But the problem is that 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 television, movies, social media, pop stars, 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 little 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 indeed teach her not to settle for being some pathetic simulacrum of who she is meant to be. Everything that they teach her, everything that 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 (which I believe is still most of the nation) 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.


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About Bishop Robert Barron 205 Articles
Bishop Robert Barron has been the bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota since 2022. He is the founder of www.WordonFire.org, a nonprofit global media apostolate that seeks to draw people into—or back to—the Catholic faith.

10 Comments

  1. Re: Fr. Mathew Hood, who discovered he had been invalidly baptized. Would that not mean that all those whose sins he had forgiven at confession over the years still unknowingly retained those sins?

    What could be done in that case?

    • I had hoped to find a more detailed treatment of this important question, which I had expected to find at Father Z’s Website. His approach is in my interpretation that if your intention was correct, and you met your obligations toward the sacrament of confession, you are covered, but if you later find out that something was not done correctly, you should raise the issue in later confession. Doing so takes so little time, and will increase your sense of peace, and make the confessor’s day.

      Please see:

      Why The Words Of Baptism Matter
      by Rev. Matthew Hood
      September 3, 2020

      The article begins:

      When I woke up on the morning of August 6, I expected the worst part of my day to be a long meeting. But then I opened my laptop to see an email about a Vatican statement, and realized that my day was about to get much worse. My world had been turned upside down.

    • Technically, yes, those sins were not absolved. But it is most likely that the penitent went to Confession again, and even though the previous sins were not related, they would be forgiven. If the person discovers that those sins were not forgiven because they were related to a non-priest, he is obligated to mention them during his next Confession. If he can’t remember them, then they are forgiven, like all of our forgotten sins are forgiven, during absolution.

    • I would remain grateful to a good Shepherd to all of these hired hands including myself.

      Even the most awkwardly impossible tasks can be divided into thirds, as detailed in the fall of many defeated enemies of God and even prominently thrust forward by the registered trademarks and logos of Mercedes Benz, a most decidedly upper echelon of worldly debasement and filthy, rotten unholiness beyond all baptismal reckoning

      Fire and Fight remain two words despite all the cravings of Fake and False temptations that face all victimized, slandered and utterly sinful Catholics out there

      Thank you for spending time with us, writers, explainers and convincers

  2. One of the things that would happen if everyone who is baptized lived up to his or her identity as a child of God is that while we would continue to recognize that all forms of slavery are evil, we would emphasize that the worst of them is slavery to sin.

  3. OK, so where is this eagle that will show me how to deploy my wings and soar? I’ve never met anyone like that in my life.

  4. There would probably be a literal revolution if baptized people were holier. With regards to the current situation, many governors would be swiftly recalled or overthrown in violent revolutions. The tyrannical “COVID-19 orders” would have been pretty much ignored.

  5. “This is the one who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And.it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is truth. For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement.” (1 John 5.6-8)

    Paul rarely baptized anyone. He wrote:

    “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on man’s wisdom, but on God’s power.” (1 Cor. 2.4, 5)

    The cup of wine is the New Covenant in Christ’s blood. (Lk. 22.20) That Covenant is our agreement with God. Blessings and curses flow from that relationship. Yet we never hear mention of this important theological doctrine. (See Jer. 31.31-34)

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