It is important to remember that not one of those infant martyrs in Bethlehem–honored by the Church from its earliest days as saints enjoying the beatific vision–received the sacrament of Baptism.
For Normals, this is not a problem, because Normals in the Church understand that God is Emmanuel–God with us, not against us–and that he gave the sacraments to us as gifts to help us because he is in our corner. They are the kisses of God: sure encounters with his grace. They are not reducing valves designed to keep as much of the human race as possible excluded from the love of God and His Trinitarian life.
This means that those who, for a host of reasons owing to no fault of their own, never obtain access to the sacraments are not thereby cut off from the grace and love of God or the hope of salvation. To be sure, if somebody knows that the sacraments are the will of God and deliberately refuses them, they are guilty of sin since wilful disobedience to God is the very definition of sin. But when it comes to unbaptized babies and other innocents, the Church wisely counsels us to stick with what we do know–that God loves us and wills our salvation–and not to despair and leap to conclusions about what we do not know. As an Orthodox proverb puts it: We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not.
The common sense summary, found in the Catechism, is this: God has bound salvation to the sacrament of baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments (CCC1257).
Thus, to those inclined to poopoo sacraments as “mumbo jumbo” and unimportant, the Church reiterates that they really do confer grace and are given as sure encounters with that grace, just as antibiotics are sure encounters with healing (not a perfect analogy, but bear with me). No sane person, suffering from cholera, says, “Nah. No treatment for me! God’s love will save me, not this mumbo jumbo about medicine! His grace alone is sufficient to heal me!” A sensible person takes everything God offers for his healing, including medicine when available. Likewise, when Jesus says, “Here are sacraments I died and rose to give you” only a fool says, “Nah! I’m good. I don’t need your sacraments. Your grace alone is sufficient” for the same reason nobody says, “I don’t need the left blade on the scissors. The right blade alone is sufficient.” When God offers you a gift, take it.
But at the same time, no sensible person objects when those without access to medicine nonetheless survive a cholera epidemic by the grace of God apart from medicine. God, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, does whatever he pleases. So only a lunatic would feel threatened when God gives his grace to help people apart from the sacraments. He’s God. He can do as he likes, as he did with the unbaptized Holy Innocents and the Good Thief.
That is one of the many reasons I regard Reactionary religion, at war with Vatican II, Pope Francis, and the Church, as mad. Because in its war on the Church it is committing more and more deeply to exiling as many people as possible from the Kingdom of God.
Józef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children lived lives of heroic virtue and bravely protected Jews and others from the Nazis, for which the entire family were ultimately murdered in March 1944. But Reactionaries (often leery of venerating Catholics who helped Jews) are upset that the godless liberal Francis is so profligate with the grace of God that he believes it extended even to a baby in the Ulma family who died before baptism. They fear that if you give that notion its head, pretty soon you’ll be letting any riff raff into Heaven. Yes, the unbaptized babies of Bethlehem are venerated, they grudgingly admit, but let’s not get carried away. The grace of God is, in the view of Reactionaries, for the few, the proud, the pure.
Not for nothing has Francis found it necessary to remind those convinced that God has chosen them to save the Church from the Pope that, “The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.“
The point of the sacraments, like the point of the primary sacrament that is the Church, is not to keep as many people out of the kingdom of God, but to make clear just how much God wants every person in an intimate personal relationship with him.
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