At the RCIA class that I am attending to support my fiancee, a person asked a question about infant baptism. He ask the deacon “if baptism requires just the ritual take place? Or does it require someone to affirm their belief and then be baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit? If my wife wills it for me to baptized and I’m not fully there with my belief, do the effects from baptism still valid?”
The deacon says that you need to have both the wanting and the ritual side for it to be valid. So the guy tells me after the class that a Catholic baptism is just a dedication because there is no way a baby can reason their belief. And that a Catholic infant baptism has no effect of washing away original sin, because you need both the ritual and the reason.
How would I explain to him that baptism does indeed wash away that original sin for infants?
Baptism does not depend upon faith for validity. Someone may receive baptism insincerely, and they receive no grace, but they are validly baptized and not to be baptized ever again. Baptism has two chief aspects: character and grace. The first corresponds to validity. Whenever the sacrament is validly administered, the one baptized always receives the baptismal character. Since the Church teaches that infants are validly baptized, they necessarily receive the character. I suppose the conferral of character can be called a dedication, but not in a sense that denies validity. Otherwise, infants would need to be re-baptized when they were older to receive the actual sacrament.
Not only do infants receive the character of baptism, they also receive the grace of baptism as well. This is because, while infants do not believe, they have no obstacle to receiving God’s grace, and the Church teaches that this is sufficient. The grace of baptism is entirely gratuitous, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church (following St. Augustine) argues this point from the very fact of infants receiving sanctifying grace in baptism.
1250 Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth in Baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called. The sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation is particularly manifest in infant Baptism. The Church and the parents would deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confer Baptism shortly after birth.
If this were denied it would lead to absurdities. No Catholic would deny that baptized infants go to heaven. But how could they go to heaven if they did not have God’s grace? It’s absurd.
Presumably, the point that your deacon is trying to make is that infants will not be saved if they fall away from faith when they acquire the use of reason, but his words, assuming they have been reported accurately, are a severe misuse of the words “validity” and “grace.”
This might even be the sort of thing that is worth taking up with the deacon (and the pastor apparently) in the future. It is not good if Catholic clergy are teaching Baptist doctrine to their unwitting flock. I don’t know what to say to them or how to say it, but good luck!
