David Ancell / Monday March 07, 2022
I remember someone pointing to the tabernacle saying “what’s in that tabernacle is not the Eucharist. Eucharist is something that we do.” Of course, that statement is not true! I heard another statement years ago that was something to the effect of “when we all get together in love, that is Holy Communion.”
Funny it always seemed to me that our primary end was to worship God himself. I remember making some statements to that effect in some kind of parish meeting and being told by another participant that “God is in everybody.” At the time, I wasn’t exactly sure how to respond.
It’s true that God’s presence is in our brothers and sisters, but God is not something we manifest, much less something we conjure up, as a product of the community. There is actually a God who is distinct from us and who is our primary end, not a product of our gathering together as a community. In fact, God is really the prime mover and the initiator.
What does this have to do with the invalid Baptisms? Well, in my previous post, I mentioned how someone using the wrong formula for a Sacrament probably has some belief that is keeping them from using the correct one, which I mentioned in Part 1 would be easy to do. Using “We baptize . . .” instead of “I baptize . . .” stems from a similar problem as the above examples regarding the Eucharist.
When a priest is administering a Sacrament, he gives his heart and lips to Christ. It is Jesus Christ who actually baptizes. It is Jesus Christ who forgives sins in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It is Jesus Christ whose body, blood, soul, and divinity we receive in the Eucharist. Jesus is Lord, and he’s the one with the power to give this grace. When a priest or deacon says “we” instead of “I” in attempting to baptize, he’s saying that the community is doing the Baptism rather than Christ. Such a Baptism would have no effect at all.
We live in a society that runs itself as though God does not exist. By making it seem that it’s really the community that acts, we run into serious danger of denying the actions of God himself. We would effectively run the Church as though God does not exist, which makes no sense. We can make it seem that our worship is really about us as a community and that some vague “kingdom” is being ushered in solely what we do together.
While we have an obligation to love our brothers and sisters, we owe the totality of our love to God alone. In John 15:16, Jesus, while giving his command to love others, mentions that it isn’t us who chose him but rather him who chose us. He is the one who first loved us. We did not gather around as a community around someone we thought was a swell guy. Rather, we were called together by the all powerful and ever living God himself, who lives and reigns forever.
Category: Catholic, Doctrine, Response
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