www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology Baptism question

I was reading the website tonight of a Serbian Orthodox church. I came across something which confused me, and I'm hoping some knowledgeable people on byzcath can help. In the section on Holy Baptism, there was a section titled "Clinical Baptism", which stated the following:

In the event an unbaptized infant is near death, a priest should be called immediately for a clinical baptism. If time is of the essence, however, and the priest is unable to arrive in time, an Orthodox lay person, or any other Christian, may baptize the infant by sprinkling Holy Water on the infant or by raising the infant up in the air three times while saying, "The Servant of God (name) is baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The section in blue both surprised and confused me. Is it the teaching of the Orthodox church that an emergency Baptism can be performed without the use of water?

P.S. I know I'll have to wait until the game is over for your replies.

Very good question!

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

I don't know the answer, except that this is a very unusual teaching.

Also, you really have to stretch the imagination to think of a situation where water isn't available. I suppose there could be an accident on the way home from the hospital......

I personally know of several infants baptized in this manner.

Even an adult catechumen who dies suddenly is normally buried as an (Orthodox) Christian. So the intent of the catechumen, his/her family, and the community that this person would have been baptized supercedes the fact that they were not.

I have known several cases were persons had begun communing (wrongly) prior to their baptism and chrismation. They were subsequently baptized and chrismated, but that does not mean that the Eucharist that they had received prior to baptism & chrismation was somehow invalid or inefficacious.

I'm usually one of the first to insist that everything in the Church be done properly and in good order, but our God is outside of time and space and the laws of physics. They are but creations of His and constructs for us.

Several? That's quite a lot in a society in which both the imminent death of an infant and the lack of water are extremely rare.


So this would be similar to the concept of "Baptism by desire"?

Unfortunately, people deny the likely (in these cases - the potential death of the child) on the superstition that by acting on their fears, they will cause them to become true. Complicating it were the many intubations that a life and death struggle in ICU entail.

Some of the cases were baptisms conducted by courageous parents under pain of imprisonment in Albania during communism. An RC priest was reported shot in the early 1970s for baptizing in homes.

Some cases were in prison (of co-prisoners, not infants) where water was rationed by the cup.

I'm not familiar with "baptism by desire" as a term but it seems to imply the same thing as I described with the Catechumens. After all, aren't all infant baptisms "by desire" of the parents and god parents? The child has no desire to go under water.

We've often referred to "baptism by blood" for the unbaptized martyrs celebrated on the church's calendar.

Baptism by desire:

"For catechumens who die before their Baptism, their explicit desire to receive it, together with repentance for their sins, and charity, assures them the salvation that they were not able to receive through the sacrament" (CCC 1259).

My great-aunt was a nurse during the period from about 1933 to 1973. During her service, she was assigned to the hospital nursery. She once told me she had baptised babies who were on the verge of death and who did, subsequently, die before a priest could be called. Latin practice was that a glass of clean water should be poured over the child's head, as it was in church with the Trinitarian formula. She told me she'd been taught to do this in her training in her Catholic nursing program.

Bob

My Godmother was taught the same thing in her nursing program, and it was standard practice in her Catholic hospital.

In the late 1950s I was also taught this in the UK during my first educational ' block' in Nurse training - and this was in an NHS Hospital not a Catholic one.

My understanding is that baptism can only be received once. Under extreme circumstances a lay person can baptize using the formula above. Assuming the newly baptized person recovers, does this person receive a "second" baptism administered by a priest in a church?

I would think not, but a "conditional" one would complete what this one started.

If the Baptism was witnessed and known to have happened, a conditional baptism isn't necessarily performed. There is generally a ceremony to complete the rites, but it doesn't involve the baptism.

My grandfather was baptized in the hospital before he underwent an emergency surgery. My grandmother (a Roman Catholic) herself baptized him, though she did have water available for the purpose. I believe the baptism was documented by my grandmother's parish, though I don't really know the details. At any rate, he was later received into the Roman Catholic Church--through the RCIA process--and he received only confirmation and communion.