NPR recently reported a story about a Catholic priest in Arizona who was judged to have performed decades of invalid baptisms by his diocese for the use of the first-person plural pronoun as the subject of the rite’s central incantation as opposed to the first-person singular. I expect that interested Catholics and Catholic authorities are likely to respond in two ways: first, the damage control of justifying the category of sacramental invalidity on the grounds of changes to the wording of a rite; second, institutional overhaul to identify other cases where this has happened (which have to be legion) and to ensure that it stops happening in the future.
For my money, the whole problem is a byproduct of a sacramental theology whose obsession with the details of form and matter have long drawn accusations of priestcraft and magical thinking. On the one hand, the sacraments are magic, at least if by magic we understand something material and sensible that gives us access to something intelligible and divine. And the development of liturgical traditions, manuals, and norms resembles the development of their magical counterparts, at least insofar as both involve rituals which develop in light of shifting geography, chronology, demography, and philosophy. But the sacraments are not magic, at least from the traditionally Christian point of view, if by that word we mean that they are purely dependent on the appropriate technical activities, or that the grace they convey is only activated by the appropriate evocations and adjurations. To suggest that the believing, celebrating priest had really failed to baptize two decades’ worth of people by a sensible, consonant change like the transition from the isolated “I” of the baptizer to the “We” of the witnessing Christian community as the mystical body of Christ into whom the baptizand is baptized, while an atheist could validly perform a baptism in a pinch simply by saying the right words, is surely so ridiculous as to merit no assent of the mind (CCC 1256).
For what it is worth, Catholics are not alone in arcane and self-serving rhetoric around the sacraments. Just as Catholics make pronouncements about validity and invalidity, so too do the Orthodox; because the Orthodox are less centralized, on the whole, than Catholics are, this leads to the periodic atrocity of the rebaptism of a Christian the form of whose original baptism could only secure the universal approval of all historic Christian communities, rationally considered. But the Orthodox, at least, do not provide formal documentation for their general belief in the invalidity of the sacraments of all non-Orthodox Christians; Catholics have attempted systematizations which beggar belief. The same kind of argumentation, for example, invalidates the baptisms performed by Fr. Andres Arango as invalidates Anglican Orders for Catholics. In the 1896 papal bull Apostolicae curae, penned by Pope Leo XIII, Leo made two sets of arguments against Anglican Orders. The first set of arguments was about extrinsic grounds, noting that Catholic practice since the English Reformation had been the ordination of converting clerics as though they had never been ordained; the second set was about intrinsic grounds and argued that the Anglican Ordinal suffered from “defect of form and intention” by the absence of certain words used in the ordination of bishops and priests. The response of the 1897 Saepius Officio, penned by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York Frederick Temple and William Maclagan, effectively destroyed the argument of Apostolicae curae by rightly pointing out that the references Rome was looking for in the Edwardine Ordinal were missing from ancient Roman and virtually all Eastern ordinals, yet of course Rome adhered to the continuing validity of her own sacraments and those of the Christian East. Rome is also happy in other situations to admit sacramental validity in the absence of its preferred language: the 2001 “Guidelines for Admission to the Eucharist Between the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East,” for example, straightforwardly acknowledges that the Assyrian liturgy and its Anaphora of Apostles Addai and Mari lack the words of institution which, elsewhere in Catholic theology, are the very means by which the Eucharist is confected, yet Catholics now recognize that liturgy as valid and effective. Noting this, the authors of Sorores in Spe, the 2021 document produced by the Malines Conversations Group (so-named for the ecumenical dialogues which took place between Anglicans and Catholics from 1921-1926), argues that Apostolicae curae can and should be overturned or recontextualized as the product of historical contexts, ecclesiastical realities, and theological methods that no longer define Catholicism or Anglicanism in the present. Especially, the development since Apostolicae curae of the ordination of women in the Anglican Communion cannot and should not posit any genuine difficulty to newly mutual recognition of Orders, not only because it was not one of the grounds on which Leo based his condemnation of them, but also because, of course, all arguments against the ordination of women are objectively ridiculous misconstructions of what ordination is and what the ordained positions of the Church are for. And all of this by way of an aside, to the point that, really, Catholicism has taken silly positions on the validity or invalidity of its own and others’ sacraments before, and has either stuck to them against all witness of reason or had to recant them in the past when their untenability has become so obvious that they cannot be maintained. The invalidity of baptisms performed by use of “We” as opposed to “I” belongs to a history of sacramental and ecclesiastical mishaps that includes the controversy over Anglican Orders and the excommunication of Michael Kerularios and, well, the Donatist controversy, which seems to be popping up all over some of the decisions the American hierarchy in particular is making or considering these days. And more than likely, just as the sensus fidelium has bucked against the bureaucratic wisdom of the hierarchy in the past, on this and other issues it shall do so again.
The original Christians were Jews, who thought of Jesus as the final prophet and future messianic king of Israel. Their practices of baptism, the imposition of hands, anointing, eucharistic banqueting were situated within the norms of Jewish life in Judea and the Diaspora: worshiping God by sacrifice and prayer in the Temple, weekly prayer and Torah-reading on the Sabbath in the synagogue, monthly and annual festivals, dietary kashrut, and participation in the wider Greco-Roman political, economic, and social culture that all ancient ethne in the Mediterranean were party to.1 Their distinctive practices were reflective, yes, of apocalyptic and messianic beliefs about the coming Kingdom: Israel’s renewal, the reckoning and reconciliation of the gentiles, the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, and the renovation of the kosmos. But they were practices whose spiritual meaning was infused from other Jewish ritual practices that they kept as Jews, and whose cultural intelligibility for Greek converts was derived from comparable practices of bathing, hygiene, feasting, and cosmological theories about forces like, say, Stoic speculation on pneuma all of which Greek-speaking Jews also shared. And indeed, these communities did believe that what these rites imparted was God’s pneuma, or ruach, the divine vitality which suffused the universe and imparted its light of intelligibility and life, which some believed had been responsible for conceiving their Master, but all knew had anointed him in the River Jordan, had gone out from him in power in his charismatic healings, exorcisms, and miracles, had metamorphosed his body to glorious, ascended form, such that this celestial spirit was now in fact his body received in the bread and wine of the messianic feast.2 And to the mystery and ecstasy of all, this most divine gift of divinity itself was offered not to the rich and the mighty, the kings of the earth and their collaborators, the aristocrats and monarchs, but the peasants, the poor, the slaves, the liminal. Persons of no status or note, indeed non-persons of the Roman Empire, could now become gods.
If Jesus’ apostoloi left any detailed instructions for initiation into the local household communities and their banquet’s celebration beyond the ordinary symposial etiquette and, perhaps, the specialized words of institution Paul reports, we do not have them: the apostolic ordinals and liturgical tradition literature are all much later.3 And enforcing uniformity of custom on the grounds of antiquity and continuity would have been beyond difficult to coordinate, and for the communities of the second century and later, geographically impossible, as Christianity was now an Asian, now a Greek, now a Latin, now a Western European, now an Egyptian, now an East and West Syriac, now an African, now a Persian, now an Indian, now a Tibetan, now a Chinese, etc. religion. Developed liturgical rites did indeed maintain some continuity across so much change, but it would be foolish to presume that even within wider liturgical, ecclesiastical, and liturgical communities that immutability of form and matter was normative or possible across so much linguistic and cultural translation. We know factually that it was not, and that for most of the Christian world at this time, such constituted no serious problem. The sacramental construction of life for Christians in the pentarchic sees around the Mediterranean—Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem—as well as in the other great cities like Nisibis, Edessa, Merv, Ctesiphon, Addis Ababa, and the like, was the same while being different, utterly diverse because its intelligibility as the ongoing unfolding of the life of God’s Spirit graciously reaching out to include the gentiles was visible in the very cultural polymorphism that Christianity repeatedly assumed.4
The quests for liturgical uniformity, and the attachment to liturgical uniformity of sacramental grace, that have characterized Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism—the imperial Christianities, whose histories are essentially tied to the institutions and destinies of Rome—reflect a discomfort with the intrinsic disorder of life and especially religion, life’s most fundamental nexus point. Catholicism in the postmodern period—the Catholicism of Vatican II, the pontificates of JPII, Benedict, and Francis—has struggled to be weaned off the imperial ambitions that have historically enabled a European-based church to claim global hegemony over the lives and practice of Christians on every continent minimally and all of them, maximally. Perhaps the current push for synodality will finally win out against this trend; probably not. But liturgically, the historical contingencies which have led to Rome’s centralized power in the past rightly raise present eyebrows at the notion that it or its vassals can declare with authority an absence of divine grace in an allegedly malpracticed rite, as though the promise of the Spirit—the only promise—were so fragile or falteringly offered that one could not count on the preserving strength of sacramental grace even if the ritual form were sundered. A thousand thousand tongues have sung to Jesus Christ as Lord, to the glory of his God and Father; the water he sanctified at his baptism has flowed over countless heads; the bread his hands tore has found its way into numberless hands, the chalice of his blood is overflowing forever. This has been true and will be true in and through all changes in rite. Men are faithless in all things, customs above all; but God is not.
Check out Paula Fredriksen’s trilogy on these topics: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (New York: Vintage, 2000), Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), and When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). On Early Judaism more generally, see John J. Collins and David C. Harlow, Early Judaism: A Comprehensive Overview (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).
On pneuma generally, I commend just reading some of the physical, cosmological, and theological speculation of surviving Stoic sources, for which Brad Inwood and Lloyd P. Gerson, The Stoics Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008) is superb.
Really, just read Alistair Stewart, The Original Bishops: Office and Order in the First Christian Communities (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2014).
For more, see David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2022), which I gave a brief review of here.
Cradle Catholic here. The powers-that-be within the Catholic Church are being ridiculous about this whole kerfuffle. They’re all about retaining absolute control through micro-management. Certain people need to get over themselves and quit trying to stuff God into a box. (Me too, probably.)
I guess, the issue is, if it were a lay person / a non christian, the right intention to perform the sacrament though unaware of the formula is justifiable unlike a trained priest intentionally changes the formula for his personal choice is considered grave.