A Primer on Sacramental Validity

Several years ago, a Detroit priest discovered that he had never been validly baptized. That discovery sent shockwaves not only through his life but through the whole archdiocese.

Fr. Matthew Hood had been reviewing a video of his own baptism 30 years earlier, when he heard with his own ears the words the deacon used to baptize him. Instead of saying “I baptize you in the name of…” the deacon said “We baptize you in the name of…,” as he poured the water over the baby’s head.

They were the wrong words for a baptism! But using the wrong words (or in this case just one word) meant that the priest’s baptism was invalid.

The implications of that act were even more shocking: The invalid baptism meant that his priestly ordination three years earlier was not valid either.

Which is to say that despite wearing a Roman collar and carrying out his parish ministry, he was not, in fact, a priest!

Objective Conditions

The incident shines a spotlight on a very important aspect of the Catholic Church’s teaching on the seven sacraments: validity.

Validity means that each sacrament has certain basic requirements for it to actually be a sacrament. If these requirements are not met, the whole ritual becomes just a pious performance, not a channel of sacramental grace.

To get our minds around this, let’s use the analogy of buying a house. I am simplifying that complex type of transaction here in order to point out the basic contours of validity.

When you buy a home, you need two essential things to make it your own: money and a contract (with the signatures of both buyer and seller). Both elements are necessary to make it a valid contract. The implications of this are clear:

• Even if you have enough money to buy the house, you don’t actually own the house until you sign the contract.
• On the other hand, even if you have a perfectly written and signed contract, you don’t actually own the house until you hand over the money.

Either way, if one of those elements is missing, you haven’t actually bought the house.

Everything else being equal, when you sign the contract and complete the payment, you are a valid homeowner according to civil law. Valid ownership of the house, likewise, means you can dispute the claims of anyone else who pretends to own it or tries to take it from you unlawfully.

So, what has any of this to do with the sacraments?

Validity in the Sacraments

Just like a civil contract, the sacraments have objective conditions of ownership: the term we use is validity. Even though it’s a rather poor analogy, receiving a sacrament is a spiritual “contract” of sorts with the Church, which is the custodian of the sacraments.

In home-buying you need money and a contract to take possession of the house as the legal owner. Analogously, to become “owner” of a sacrament, you need matter and form.

• Matter is like the money. It refers to some substance that makes up the tangible part of the sacrament.  The water in baptism and the bread and wine in the Eucharist are the easiest sacramental matter to recognize.
• The form or the “formula” of the sacrament is like the contract. It is the distinct set of words that define what the sacrament means.

Both matter and form are required for you to have a “legal”, that is, valid sacrament. Just like the sale of a house, if one or the other is missing, you don’t “own” the sacrament.

This is relevant in regard to the priest’s baptismal ceremony.

The deacon used the proper matter—water—but the other necessary element for a valid baptism was missing.  He used the wrong form (“We baptize you…”), so the sacramental “contract” was null and void. Or perhaps it’s better to say, a sacrament never even came to be despite going through the motions of it.

The baby in question did not, in fact, take “ownership” of the sacrament of baptism that day – even though everyone presumed he did.

The Question of Legality

“Aren’t you Catholics being a bit ‘legalistic’ like those Pharisees Jesus condemned?” someone might ask. It was just one word difference! Why quibble?

In fact, many critics of the Church have asked that question in the past. It’s a good question, but there is also a very good answer:

Since we cannot see spiritual acts with our eyes, we must have some way to be certain that the spiritual effects took place.

In short, when the ministers of the Church meet those objective conditions for validity, we are certain we have received the sacraments in question.

Certitude of this kind is very important when the benefits themselves are invisible. We can see money and a written contract when we buy a house, but we cannot see grace. Therefore, we need tangible elements of some sort in order to have the assurance of a spiritual act and effect.

Proper matter and form prove that we received the spiritual benefit the Church promised to us. These make it possible for us to claim personal ownership of the good works of God in our souls.

We can, of course, lose the spiritual benefits (grace) of them by our own fault through sin, but we still own these sacramental gifts if we received them validly. No one can take them from us.

That fact alone gives us hope for renewal even when we have lost the grace of the sacraments by our sin. We are not abandoned by God or the Church! We have hope of restoration.

Why It Matters

St. Augustine had to deal with accusations and doubts of this sort in the fifth century. His time saw many Christians falling away from the Church because of the persecutions of the Roman Empire. They committed sins of apostasy and idolatry in abandoning the faith and worshipping the Emperor against God’s commandments.

Many fallen away Christians repented of their apostasy and later wanted to return to the Church, but other Christians refused to receive them back. They said the fallen away Catholics had renounced their baptismal vows.

They had sinned, yes, but had the sin of the apostates actually invalidated their baptism when they fell away? Not according to Augustine. 

He said that the sacrament they received was as valid after their apostasy as it was on the day they were baptized. They lost the grace of the sacrament, surely, but they had not undone the sacrament.

Augustine thus led the movement to forgive and welcome back into the Church all who had lapsed. His reasoning was not sentimental. It was sacramental.

It’s Still Happening Today

There is a modern version of Augustine’s lapsed Catholic scenario. For example, a Jehovah’s Witness once proudly announced to me that he too had once been a Catholic but had renounced his Catholic faith by sending his baptismal certificate back to the local parish.

I told him, “I hate to break the news to you, but even though you walked away from us, you’re still baptized.” I then explained to him that sending a piece of paper to a parish (or even to the Vatican!) does not invalidate anyone’s baptism.

Granted, he was no longer a member of the Church, but that didn’t mean he was no longer baptized. What Christ has done, man cannot undo.

This scenario is the inverse of the priest’s, who never actually received baptism, but they both manifest the truth of validity: you’re either baptized or you’re not. If they did performed the sacrament correctly (as we presume was the case of the JW), nothing can undo it. If they didn’t meet the minimum conditions for validity, you have to go back and do it again!

The Priest’s Solution

Which is exactly what the Archdiocese of Detroit did. The real problem for the priest was that all the sacraments he received after his invalid baptism were also invalid – including the Sacrament of Holy Orders! Ouch.

The other six sacraments require a validly baptized person as a condition for their own validity. Baptism is like the lock into which all the other spiritual keys of the sacraments fit. If the lock isn’t even there, the keys don’t open the door to grace.

So, while Fr. Hood went through all the motions of his sacraments as a child or young man (Penance, Eucharist, Confirmation, and even Ordination), he never really received them spiritually because he was not baptized.

Without a doubt, he received much grace from all the prayer and spiritual rituals he participated in, and he and his parents bore no guilt whatsoever for attempting to receive other sacraments with the sincerest of intentions. He just didn’t actually receive the sacraments.

So, to be absolutely certain that the priest received the sacrament of Holy Orders, the Archbishop of Detroit (re-)baptized him, confirmed him, and ordained him – validly, this time. Now he’s a priest!

Going to all that trouble shows how much Catholics believe in the Church’s sacramental power to “bind and loose”, a gift of spiritual authority that was given to the Church by Christ Himself (Mt 16:18-20).

For the question of the form and matter of all the other sacraments, you can read and even download this list.