I have a question about confirmation, as a non-Catholic.
I have just read about confirmation on the NewAdvent site but I am a bit confused. If Confirmation results in the Holy Spirit coming in or upon a person, then what is it that Catholics believe happens at the time of their conversion & baptism?
Does the person receive the Holy Spirit at conversion? If not, then how is it that they are “saved”? So, for example, Catholics baptize infants but if the Holy Spirit is not given, then how is it a guarantee that the child will go to heaven if they die before the age of reason?
Please forgive me if I have confused terminology or anything. I come from a purely Protestant background and am kindof learning about Catholic beliefs.
Thanks.
“Conversion” as a cultural norm doesn’t
really mean anything in the Catholic Church. If you are baptized validly, that “counts” as, is, your conversion in itself.
Again, if we accept that baptism
is the conversion, then yes, the Holy Spirit is received at conversion. Catholics do not believe in believers’ baptism. It doesn’t work that way. You have to be physically baptized with water and the right words to be baptized, and thus, to receive the Holy Spirit. So, if we say that believers’ baptism, that is, “Accepting Jesus as [my] personal Lord and Savior,” as Protestants say, is what constitutes conversion, then no, that person doesn’t receive the Holy Spirit.
The pivotal moment of conversion, so to speak, in a Catholic’s life, is his or her water baptism, whenever that happens. If you’re thinking, “Does that mean a proper Protestant baptism is valid in the Catholic Church?” then you would be right. If a Protestant is baptized in the proper manner (which they usually are) then yes, the baptism is valid in the Catholic Church. In other words, the Catholic Church views all validly baptized Protestants as, essentially, Catholics separated from the Catholic Church. Funny, isn’t it?
So it just depends on what counts as conversion. “Accepting Jesus as [my] personal Lord and Savior” doesn’t count as conversion in the Catholic Church, no. Being baptized with water and the right words is what counts as conversion on a very technical level.
When a baptized Protestant (who, as I’ve illustrated, is already technically a Catholic) wants to “convert” to Catholicism in the sense that he or she wants to be accepted fully into the institutional Church and be able to receive the other Sacraments, such as the Eucharist, etc., then Confirmation is what counts as that person’s “conversion,” even though technically they’re already “converted” by having been baptized. Everyone receives a mark from the Holy Spirit from baptism, but infinite
graces from the Holy Spirit are received at Confirmation. Being baptized is just the bare minimum, as it were. Confirmation is kind of like an extension of that, a fullness of what you receive at baptism. The reason that Confirmation counts as the “conversion” on a cultural level to Catholicism is because for a baptized Protestant to be confirmed, he or she must receive instruction about the Church and the Church’s beliefs and teachings; that is what counts as the “conversion” if by conversion we mean becoming part of the institutional Church. The sacrament of Confirmation seals that teaching and learning process. To convert to any religion, one has to be taught about it. It’s the same for Catholicism. To be Catholic, you have to be baptized; that’s the basic necessity. But the reason we call baptized Protestants Protestants, even thought technically they are Catholic, is because they haven’t received instruction in the Church’s teachings. When they express an interest to do so, the thing that marks the end of that is their Confirmation, which also so happens to be a Sacrament which confers infinite graces from the Holy Spirit. Note that this is a very basic explanation, but it gets the main gist of it across. This is all very confusing because we have conversion on two levels: one one level, conversion is merely a superficial formality, and on another level, conversion is receiving a Christian baptism.
Infants who die after being baptized go to heaven because they are under the age of reason. The Church teaches that seven years of age is the age at which humans understand right from wrong, and thus is the age at which they are able to be held responsible for the wrong things they do. It is the age at which they first become able to commit sin. If an infant dies after being baptized, it is impossible for him or her to go to hell, because to go to hell, one has to be in mortal sin. The infant’s baptism wiped away his or her Original Sin, and since children cannot commit sin of their own until they turn seven years old, the infant is free of sin, and everyone free of mortal sin goes to heaven.
