Please contact the Parish office or speak to Father Alphonse after Sunday Mass if you want to get your child baptised. If you are and adult and would like to get baptised we would be so excited to welcome you into our church, please see the 'Becoming a Catholic' tab on our website.
The sacrament of Baptism is the beginning of life—supernatural life
Because of original sin, we come into the world with a soul which is supernaturally dead. We come into the world with only the natural endowments of human nature. The supernatural life which is the result of God’s personal and intimate indwelling, is absent from the soul.
Jesus instituted the sacrament of Baptism to apply to each individual soul the atonement which He made on the Cross for original sin.
Jesus will not force His gift upon us, the gift of supernatural life for which He paid. He holds the gift out to us hopefully, but each of us must freely accept it.
We make that acceptance by receiving the sacrament of Baptism.
When the sacrament of Baptism is administered, the spiritual vacuum which we call original sin disappears as God becomes present in the soul, and the soul is caught up into that sharing of God’s own life which we call sanctifying grace.
Children of God
The sacrament of Baptism not only gives us sanctifying grace: it also makes us adopted children of God and heirs of heaven.
We say “adopted” children because God the Father has only one begotten Son—Jesus Christ. He is God’s only Son through generation; the rest of us become God’s children by adoption.
As children of God, we receive our inheritance at the very moment of our adoption, at the very moment of Baptism. Our inheritance is eternal union with God, and we have that inheritance now, once we are baptized.
Nobody can take this inheritance away. Not even God, who has bound Himself by irrevocable promise never to take back what He has given. We ourselves can renounce our rights—as we will do if we commit mortal sin—but no one else can deprive us of our heritage.
The point to be emphasized, and never to be forgotten, is that we are potentially in heaven the moment we are baptized.
The mark of a Christian
Two big things happen to us when we are baptized.
We receive the supernatural life, called sanctifying grace, which dissipates the spiritual emptiness of original sin. And there is imparted to the soul a permanent and distinctive quality which we call the character or the mark of Baptism.
That is true, also, of the other five sacraments. None of them can mean a thing to us until first the capacity for receiving the other sacraments has been established in the soul by the character of Baptism.
This is because it is by the character of actual Baptism that we “put on Christ,” in the words of St. Paul. It is the character of Baptism, according to St. Thomas, that “configures” us to Christ and makes us participants in His eternal priesthood.
By Baptism we are given the power—and the obligation—to share with Christ in those things which pertain to divine worship: the Mass and the sacraments.
