Denver Newsroom, Aug 22, 2020 / 02:10 pm (CNA).-
If you think you’re a priest, and you really aren’t, you have a problem. So do a lot of other people. The baptisms you performed are valid baptisms. But the confirmations? No. The Masses you celebrated were not valid. Nor the absolutions or anointings. And the marriages? Well…it’s complicated. Some yes, some no. It depends on the paperwork, believe it or not.
Father Matthew Hood of the Archdiocese of Detroit learned all this the hard way.
He thought he’d been ordained a priest back in 2017. He’d been doing priestly ministry since then.
And then this summer, he learned he wasn’t a priest at all. In fact, he learned he wasn’t even baptized.
If you want to become a priest, you must first become a deacon. If you want to become a deacon, you must first be baptized. If you’re not baptized, you can’t become a deacon, and you can’t become a priest.
Of course, Fr. Hood thought he had been baptized as a baby. But this month, he read a note issued by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The note said that changing the words of baptism in certain ways make it invalid. That if the person doing the baptizing says “We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” instead of “I baptize you…” the baptism is not valid.
He remembered a video he’d watched of his own baptism ceremony. And he remembered that the deacon said “We baptize you….”
His baptism wasn’t valid.
Father Hood called his archdiocese. He needed to be ordained. But first, after three years of acting like a priest, living like a priest, and feeling like a priest, he needed to become a Catholic. He needed to be baptized.
In short order, he was baptized, confirmed, and received the Eucharist. He made a retreat. He was ordained a deacon. And on Aug. 17, Matthew Hood finally became a priest. For real.
The Archdiocese of Detroit announced this unusual circumstance in a letter released Aug. 22.
The letter explained that after he realized what had happened, Fr. Hood “was recently validly baptized. Furthermore, since other sacraments cannot be validly received in the soul without valid baptism, Father Hood also was recently validly confirmed and validly ordained a transitional deacon and then a priest.”
“Let us give thanks and praise to God for blessing us with Father Hood’s ministry.”
The archdiocese released a guide, explaining that people whose marriages were celebrated by Fr. Hood should contact their parish, and that the archdiocese was making its own efforts to contact those people.
The archdiocese also said it was making efforts to contact other people who had been baptized by Deacon Mark Springer, the deacon who invalidly baptized Hood, and is believed to have invalidly baptized others, during 14 years at St. Anastasia Parish in Troy, Michigan, using the same invalid formula, a deviation from the rite clerics are required to use when performing baptisms.
The guide clarified that while absolutions performed by Fr. Hood before his valid ordination were not themselves valid, “we can be assured that all those who approached Father Hood, in good faith, to make a confession did not walk away without some measure of grace and forgiveness from God.”
“That said, if you recall any grave (mortal) sins that you would have confessed to Father Hood before he was validly ordained and you have not yet been to a subsequent confession, you must bring them to your next confession explaining to any priest what has happened. If you cannot remember if you confessed any grave sins, you should bring that fact to your next confession as well. A subsequent absolution will include those sins and will give you peace of mind,” the guide said.
The archdiocese also answered a question it expects many Catholics will be asking: “Isn’t it legalistic to say that, even though there was an intention to confer a sacrament, there was no sacrament because different words were used? Won’t God just take care of it?”
“Theology is a science that studies what God has told us and, when it comes to sacraments, there must not only be the right intention by the minister but also the right ‘matter’ (material) and the right ‘form’ (words/gestures – such as a triple pouring or immersion of water by the one saying the words). If one of those elements is missing, the sacrament is not valid,” the archdiocese explained.
“As far as God ‘taking care of it,’ we can trust that God will assist those whose hearts are open to Him. However, we can have a much greater degree of confidence by strengthening ourselves with the sacraments He has entrusted to us.”
“According to the ordinary plan God has established, the Sacraments are necessary for salvation: baptism brings about adoption into the family of God and places sanctifying grace in the soul, since we are not born with it, and the soul needs to have sanctifying grace when it departs from the body in order to spend eternity in heaven,” the archdiocese added.
The archdiocese said it first became aware that Deacon Springer was using an unauthorized formula for baptism in 1999. The deacon was instructed to stop deviating from liturgical texts at that time. The archdiocese said that, though illicit, it had believed the baptisms Spring had performed to be valid until the Vatican’s clarification this summer.
The deacon is now retired “and no longer in active ministry,” the archdiocese added.
No other Detroit priests are believed to be invalidly baptized, the archdiocese said.
And Fr. Hood, newly baptized and newly ordained? After an ordeal that began with a deacon’s liturgical “innovation,” Fr. Hood is now serving at a parish named for a deacon saint. He’s the new pastor at St. Lawrence Parish in Utica, Michigan.
.
[…]
Pilgrims compare to a Synodal Church on a forever journey as like unto like. Catholic pilgrims historically visited holy sites, monasteries and the like. Recent Synod on synodality discussions confirmed there is no definitive agenda, no expected findings consistent with Apostolic tradition [quite the contrary] no Magisterial confirmation. A voyage of discovery seeking enlightenment from the Holy Spirit.
With no process of confirmation that purported revelations are from the third person of the Trinity this will be challenging. There’ll likely be many such revelations, many at odds discussions as endless as the journey. Onlookers, the attendant Mystical Body if such unfolds will likely assume our revealed faith is more a matter of perspective than permanence. Seminaries, if they were still thought useful, would presumably turn from Thomas Aquinas to Heraclitus. My advice to the remaining faithful is store up on the Fathers of the Church.
“…store up on the Church Fathers”…Yes, and as such, “ressourcement” (including the Scriptures) was one pillar of the much-maligned (and, yes, less than perfect) and then betrayed Second Vatican Council. The other pillar was “aggiornamento,’ or engagement with the modern world without accommodating and blending synodally (?) into the streamflow of Heraclitus.
But wait! Somewhere in the venadecum there’s a warning of fully two or three words not to buy into “passing opinion.” So there! All is well.
“Fisichella revealed that the motto approved by the pope “can be summed up in two words: Pilgrims of Hope.’”
Um, I was never great at math, but I’m pretty sure “Pilgrims of Hope” numbers three words, not two.
Not important, you say?
Okay, maybe not. But if it’s the good archbishop’s job to introduce this weighty, portentous theme for this very significant event, shouldn’t the very first thing he says about it be, like, accurate?
Why is it that I always have the feeling that I’m expecting too much from this papacy?
Jubilee celebrations have long been too spiritualized to consist mainly in pilgrimages and the original biblical and Christological meaning of the Jubilee lost. Leviticus 25 had economic rebooting dimensions with the release of slaves and return and rest of lands which was expounded in Isaiah 62 and became Jesus’ vision-mission statement in Luke 4:18-19. I wish and pray in this 2025 Jubilee we return to these scriptural roots and the Holy Spirit move the Church to speak and act more and more against global economic inequity and ecological devastation.