Dear Friends at Saint Frances Cabrini Parish and Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish: Praised be Jesus Christ! Worthy of commentary as we begin Lent, which is of course its own event, are two news stories that are more connected than one might guess at first glance. One story is the seriously alarming conflict between Russia and the Ukraine. There are a million angles and facets to this story from a political and religious perspective, each capable of generating stacks of commentaries about implications, lessons, etc. One element of the situation that will require some focus and unpacking has to do with the fact that we are currently witnessing violent fighting among fellow, baptized Christians. Unlike so many other modern geo-political flashpoints that have erupted between Christians and Muslims, in this case we are essentially watching a war among the baptized. Granted one can note the religious complexities between the Catholics, Protestants, and the Orthodox Churches because one cannot simply say they are all identical religious groups. Nonetheless, there are a lot of Christians on both sides of the conflict right now, and they are all baptized, and they are engaged in all-out war. This is (currently) a smaller-scale version of the much bigger identical moral quandary over World War I and II in the European theater. How is it possible that for several years a whole continent full of churches, full of baptized people, and across regions where thousands of Masses were offered everyday it was the case that they slaughtered each other? It is rarely discussed how much delayed damage occurred to the sense of faith of ordinary believers after both world wars in Europe simply because the sheer volume of the bloodshed among fellow believers posed a serious credibility problem for the Christianity as a whole. Sacraments are not magic. They do not automatically give rise to good behaviors that uphold dignity. They do not remove human free will and they are celebrated inevitably in a world that is fallen, meaning evil always needs to be reconquered until Christ returns. This is the accurate theological response to the post-war and current-war questions about authentic Christian belief and behaviors. Still, one must be disposed to truly hear those answers. The fact is that so many decades of violence and slaughter among Christians generates a scandal in hearts that is difficult to remove. It does lead to the wide-scale perception among the Catholic, Christian, and Orthodox peoples that sacraments are mere ceremonies, regardless of whatever the Church officially has taught to the contrary for centuries. What does baptism do? It opens the recipient to the possibility of a life of grace because of the relational pathway it opens up to God and the wider community within one’s soul. It allows for the possibility of union with God in this life and the next if one engages the graces that come from it. A sacrament guarantees God is present and ready to work, but it does not guarantee that we are sufficiently going to engage his presence. What a sacrament guarantees is the open channel of grace that is made available, but only if the sacrament is celebrated properly. Which leads to the second news story that has raised alarm in Catholic circles, this one involving the Arizona priest who invalidly baptized a whole lot of people because he changed one word in the baptism formula. The ancient and consistent Catholic teaching is that one cannot change sacramental formulas without them ceasing to be sacraments. We have never deviated from this point. Among the most clear and consistent of our articulations of this principle, and the one that is the most widely shared among all Christians, is the required formula for baptism. If one alters it, one is not baptized. End of story. As the for-instance of wars clearly shows, sacraments are not magic. However, if we are going to maintain even in the face of so much historical scandal by baptized Christians that sacraments do offer a sure guarantee of God’s availability, then it logically follows that there must be a required formula that makes them available. They cannot be ceremonies that we simply make up or modify at will because if that were the case, we would be the ones generating them, not God. Sacraments are God’s action, and the guarantee of this truth is our established sacramental system which relies on very carefully preserved ancient formulas. If we dismiss the Arizona story as silly and arcane Catholic hair-splitting then we inescapably place ourselves in the category of people who think sacraments are mere ceremonies. If we think that way, then we have no hope of being saved because we are taking upon ourselves the action and definition of salvation. If we think that way then our moral fortitude to rise up and put an end to wars is seriously weakened because we are excluding God from the possibility of actually acting in concrete situations, especially in situations that are too big for us on our own. Believing in sacraments does not put an end to wars. If only it were that easy. But it does allow us to believe that God does not abandon us to solve our problems all on our own. It also requires that we admit that there is a right and a wrong way to celebrate sacraments. If we do not believe that, then we’ve decided they are meaningless.