Question

I have a question pertaining to baptism, and the only way I can think of how to pose it is in the form of one of those word problems you find in text books.

Alright so a person comes from a house with two different faiths. On parent, who is catholic, has them baptized as an infant. However said person is then taken and raised by their grandparent who is rather Baptist. They are then brought up exclusively in the bapist faith. However due to a crushing fear of water (and their church’s practice of dunking people in the local river for baptism) they were never baptized in the baptist faith.

So my question is if a person has no knowledge of catholic faith, has never been to a catholic mass, and does not agree with many doctrines of the catholic church, does the baptism they recieved as a child still “count” or would they need to be re-baptized? Me and my friend are both stumped as to whether she’s covered under the baptism she had as a child or if she needs to be baptized again into her chosen faith.

Your friend’s Catholic baptism as an infant still counts. Indeed, any baptism in any denomination still counts (assuming it was a valid Trinitarian baptism). “We believe in *one* baptism for the forgiveness of sins” says the Creed. That is exactly why the Church rejected anabaptist (“baptize again”) theories in the 16th century. Here’s the catechism:

An indelible spiritual mark . . .

1272 Incorporated into Christ by Baptism, the person baptized is configured to Christ. Baptism seals the Christian with the indelible spiritual mark (character) of his belonging to Christ. No sin can erase this mark, even if sin prevents Baptism from bearing the fruits of salvation.83 Given once for all, Baptism cannot be repeated.

1273 Incorporated into the Church by Baptism, the faithful have received the sacramental character that consecrates them for Christian religious worship.84 The baptismal seal enables and commits Christians to serve God by a vital participation in the holy liturgy of the Church and to exercise their baptismal priesthood by the witness of holy lives and practical charity.85

1274 The Holy Spirit has marked us with the seal of the Lord (“Dominicus character”) “for the day of redemption.”86 “Baptism indeed is the seal of eternal life.”87 The faithful Christian who has “kept the seal” until the end, remaining faithful to the demands of his Baptism, will be able to depart this life “marked with the sign of faith,”88 with his baptismal faith, in expectation of the blessed vision of God – the consummation of faith – and in the hope of resurrection.

Baptism is not, to be sure, a punched ticket for heaven. You can destroy the life of grace in the soul. But the remedy for that is not to be baptized again, any more than the remedy for cancer is climb back into the womb again. It is to seek healing from the Divine Physician through the sacrament of reconciliation and to live out thereafter the grace one was given in baptism.