Undermining Apologies (1600 words)

Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, Claude Vignon (1593-1670)

Before I left Twitter two years ago, I was disturbed by a pattern I noticed in cases of mass public criticism. I’m sure you’re familiar with the dynamic where subsets of Twitter choose a “villain of the day” to brutally criticize and mock; if someone lands in this situation, it’s almost impossible for them to apologize in a way that others will broadly accept. The goal of this post is to evaluate some popular reasons for rejecting apologies as insincere, giving them credit for what they get right but also identifying cases where they fail. I’ve drawn from my memories of Twitter because I saw this process unfold many hundreds of times on that platform, but I think that these observations are also applicable to apologies between people who know each other. 

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to give clear guidelines that will work out in every case. Some people are already too strongly inclined to trust people who have mistreated them; these people need to become less charitable, and the last thing I want is for someone to be worse off because they followed my advice. Still, I suspect that most people can safely rule out the possibility that they are far too forgiving, and this post is directed at that vocal majority. 

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Here are a few examples that I can remember being cited as evidence that an apology was insincere, reconstructed for an apologizer named Abigail:

1. Abigail uses a phrase which is often flagged as evidence of an insincere apology–for example, the phrase ”I’m so sorry that [group] felt trivialized by my comments” may be read through the standard line, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” 

2. Abigail’s apology contains an error unrelated to the mistake for which she is apologizing. For example, her apology uses the phrase “he or she” to refer to a generic person, whereas “they” is considered superior because it includes people who use other pronoun sets.

3. Abigail mentions other positive things about herself or her history, perhaps to demonstrate that whatever she did is not indicative of her character to the extent that other people have assumed.

4. Abigail apologizes for some portion of the accusations against her, but rejects some other accusations as illegitimate.

5. Abigail falls short of an arbitrarily high standard of penance, such as donating a very large portion of her income or quitting her job.

6. Someone asserts, without even citing evidence, that Abigail is only apologizing for personal gain, and that any apology she makes is not to be trusted.

7. Abigail took too long to apologize (even a few hours of delay can earn this criticism).

8. The act is simply declared to be unforgivable; to seek an apology is to downplay its moral wrongness.

People know about this post and still use Twitter!

The first five arguments are kind of latching onto something real:

(1) Some people really do make “I’m sorry you feel that way”-type apologies in an attempt to gain the social benefits of apologizing without the psychological burden of feeling bad about their conduct. Still, I’ve seen some apparently heartfelt apologies torn to shreds over minor accidents of phrasing that merely remind people of bad conduct.

(2) Of course it’s possible that Abigail ought to apologize for something she said while apologizing-–apologies aren’t immune to criticism. But again, if her apology for X is apparently sincere, then Y should be treated as a totally different matter. 

(3) Some apologies are unhelpful because Abigail focuses more on defending her character than she does on redressing harm. Ideally, people would criticize Abigail for doing X, and their criticism would remain proportionate to that particular action; then, when Abigail apologizes for X, both the action and the apology play a modest role in determining her reputation in X-like affairs. The problem is that, when Abigail is accused of X, she is also accused of being an X-er, a person who loves doing X, X-es whenever she can get away with it, and kicks puppies. Under these circumstances, it’s very reasonable for Abigail to let us know that she doesn’t do X all the time, and that in fact she has a long history of not doing X and campaigning against the people who do. Most people are not rhetorically savvy, so we should expect Abigail to have some trouble raising this point in a way that perfectly balances her intention to apologize against her need to defend herself against brutal criticism.

(4) As you likely know, people sometimes apologize for relatively mild accusations against themselves in order to distract from more serious accusations. In situations like this, where an accused person has obviously overlooked a serious, plausible accusation in order to address a lesser one, I think it’s reasonable to view that person’s apology with suspicion. However, it’s also extremely common for a person who has been legitimately accused of one thing to be illegitimately accused of others. When a person becomes infamous for some particular reason, it’s very likely that people will find additional reasons to hate them. Once you reach the point that many and diverse criticisms are circulating about a despised person, it’s extremely likely that some of these criticisms are false, even if the earliest or most significant accusations are true. Accusations must be considered separately, and accused people must have the option of apologizing for some wrongs while denying others.

(5) If I am known to have a lot of money, and especially if I profited from doing something immoral, then it could be reasonable for other people to expect me to “open my wallet” as a show of contrition for a wrongful action. First, the demand must scale with income–a poor person’s contrition should be acceptable without a donation, and a middle class person can only be expected to donate some amount that she can reasonably afford.

Second, these calls must be proportionate and consistent. In practice, this move is almost always bad because people make up standards idiosyncratically; any random person could say, “I don’t trust this because you haven’t donated to [X charity].” Even if Abigail has donated to a relevant charity, her critics are likely to disagree about which one she should have chosen. (Imagine that Abigail said something offensive about autistic people and subsequently donated $5,000 to Autism Speaks, a charity which many autistic people dislike because it frames autism as a disease in need of a “cure.” Rather than successfully demonstrating her contrition, Abigail now has to deal with criticisms like, “Of course she supports Autism Speaks.”) Even if she chooses an appropriate charity, people might insist that she should donate more money; they may tell each other that she is much wealthier than she actually is, and thus set the standard at a level which is unreasonably or impossibly high.

Lastly, a large majority of transgressions are too trivial for this approach to be reasonable. Everyone makes moral errors frequently. Imagine living under a degree of scrutiny where you’re expected to give up thousands of dollars every time you say something unintentionally hurtful. There should be a strong presumption against demanding donations as proof of contrition; anyone making this argument should be on the hook to support it extremely well.

(6), (7), and (8), however, are useless. (6), the evidence-insensitive claim that Abigail is only apologizing for personal gain, is a fully general argument–it sounds plausible every time someone apologizes, regardless of any other relevant information. The truth is that almost all apologies are partly selfish: Even if I really am contrite, of course I also want to be accepted and forgiven. I think that almost anyone who tries to be honest with themselves will notice that they, too, have some selfish motives when they apologize. Maybe there are a handful of sages who act with a mindset of selfless moral clarity, but I doubt that even one such person is rationalizing hatred on Twitter. 

(7), the tendency to punish delayed apologies, makes it even more difficult to escape the first six criticisms. It’s completely unreasonable to expect someone to apologize perfectly according to these standards within a few hours of becoming a target of mass criticism. We should actively expect people to cool off before apologizing, and any delay should not be considered a mark against their sincerity. 

Do I even need to explain the problem with (8), the tendency to declare an act unforgivable and to blame a person for seeking forgiveness? This is naked cruelty. I’m personally disposed to think that there are no unforgivable actions, but even if we disagree about that, I think we should agree that there are very few things a person can do to become unforgivable. Even if someone has committed an unforgivably heinous action, it is cruel to punish them specifically for apologizing, especially when other people have threatened to punish them for failing to apologize.

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We’re too worried about accepting fake apologies, and we aren’t worried enough about rejecting real ones. When you’re tempted to reject an apology, stop what you’re doing immediately and think: Why specifically do I want to reject this apology? How sure am I that I know what’s going on in her head? If she’s really sorry, how would I know? Is it possible that I just want to hurt her, or that I’m afraid other people will judge me if I let her off too easily? Is there any apology she could possibly make that I would recognize as legitimate, and how would she know to apologize in that way? Challenge yourself at every step, and don’t give up on apologies so easily. 

Is Encanto Catholic? (650 words)

Source: "Encanto Teaches Us to See God in Ourselves and Others"

No, but I wish it were!

Encanto is the best Disney canon movie since the mid-90s, and I had a lot of fun watching it. One of the movie’s strengths is its rich ensemble cast, a sprawling multi-generational Colombian family who have received a mixed blessing: Every person born into the family possesses a unique magical talent, and it’s assumed that this will carry on for generations so long as they “keep the miracle burning.” Only the protagonist, Mirabel, is born without a power.

The movie takes place in a Catholic community. As of 2017, Colombia was 73% Catholic and 14% Protestant; since Encanto takes place vaguely in the 20th century, I’m guessing that the proportion of Catholics was even larger at that time. Luisa mentions that she helps the community by building churches, and at least one scene prominently depicts a Catholic priest in uniform:

Un sacerdote catolico.

I think it would have been great if Encanto had taken place in an explicitly Christian universe! The characters pray for and receive miracles, but they never explicitly talk about the source of the miracles. Abuela says that the family must “earn the miracle / that somehow found us,” and Mirabel’s “I Want” song, “Waiting on a Miracle,” closes with a plea that sounds like a prayer: “Bless me now as you blessed us all those years ago—when you gave us a miracle!” Who is “you”? Mirabel must mean God, right? How strange that the characters never consider the cosmic significance of the magic that dominates their lives! What is God telling them, what does He want them to do? Encanto is already one of the most emotionally mature Disney movies, but it would be even more interesting if the filmmakers were willing to explore emotions such as resenting that God chose you for something you don't want, worrying that you've fallen short of God's standards, or wondering why God didn’t choose you at all.

(Bonus: In that same scene, you can see Mirabel clasp her hands together in prayer at 2:26—but her hands are obscured because the camera is behind her, and when we do see her from the front she immediately pulls her hands apart! Her hands aren't quite in the right position, but I still think it's what they were going for.)

Not praying, just thinking.

Of course, I can’t actually blame the filmmakers for playing down the religious implications, since the movie I want would have been much more controversial than the movie they actually made. I don't know whether many non-Christians would have been offended if they did this, but I think that some Christians would have been upset to learn that, for example, Bruno’s prophetic powers are a gift from God. (Take a moment to read about the fate of seers in Dante’s hell!) I’m glad that the movie at least acknowledges religion rather than scrubbing it out of the setting entirely, but I wish that our popular media were more comfortable engaging with religion and depicting religious worldviews. I especially like it when children’s movies take religion seriously, and (as unlikely as this is right now) I would be especially pleased if major animated studios set movies in the worlds of Islam, Buddhism, Shintoism, pre-colonial native religions, and other traditions outside of Christianity and Judaism. All of us have religion—either we are religious, or else our thoughts and values are shaped by (or built against) the religions that live alongside us. In a religiously pluralist society such as ours, the ideal is not for our popular media to be thoroughly secular, but for media to reflect the experiences and values of many different people.

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Movies that take place within a religion or folk tradition: Spirited Away, Coco, The Color of Paradise, The Prince of Egypt, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Other movies and shows that take religion seriously (without supernatural elements): Spotlight, Doubt, Amadeus, Jane the Virgin.

New YouTube Video!

Sam Golden (IG: @samuelbgolden) edited a YouTube video where I discuss my views from this post about sexual orientation. We had a lot of fun recording this, and I make several arguments that the blog post didn't cover, so I hope you'll check it out! We've already recorded a few other videos, so there should be more soon. 

The Aesthetics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Fascism (1000 words)

Willem van Heythusen, Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977)

[Epistemic status: This is a quick attempt to work something out based on what I already know, but I haven’t done a lot of research yet.] 

Americans broadly disapprove of monarchy, and yet we love monarchy in popular culture.¹ The popularity of Disney princesses, Game of Thrones, and the literal British monarchy all speak to a fascination with the idea of absolute rule. We yearn for the unity of power and goodness within a single person, and we feel a sense of loss that our own institutions are so young, historically discontinuous, and incapable of acting with single-minded clarity and purpose.

I first noticed this tendency in myself when I took a class about politics in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare has written some truly humiliating depictions of royalty, and his histories depict British monarchs as flawed and sometimes despicable. Still I found myself arrested whenever a character named king was speaking, not because those characters were especially wise or interesting, but because they were so powerful. A moment in Richard II captures my feeling perfectly. Richard has just sentenced Henry Bolingbroke—later to become Henry IV by violently displacing Richard—to ten years of banishment, but when Henry’s father intervenes on his behalf, Richard reduces the sentence to only six years. Henry says in an aside,

                        How long a time lies in one little word!

                        Four lagging winters and four wanton springs

                        End in a word: such is the breath of kings.

Henry is at once humiliated, jealous, and awed. This is how it feels to recognize a sovereign power.

There are endless disputes about the identity politics of Disney Princesses (literally ™), but how often have you heard people criticize Disney for depicting so many princesses to begin with? Besides that The Lion King, probably the most popular Disney animated movie, is fully a monarchist film. When the divinely chosen hereditary monarch is on the throne, the Pride Lands are phenomenally beautiful. Lions rule over the other animals in a just hierarchy which ultimately benefits everyone. When a usurper takes the throne, nature itself revolts against him, as the Pride Lands inexplicably suffer a drought until the end of Scar’s rule. The movie borrows numerous beats from early modern monarchist literature: The device of nature revolting across a false king is straight out of Macbeth, and other works suggest that it’s acceptable for the king to hoard wealth because he, too, will eventually die. (Sorry I don’t have a source for this—I just remember it from a college class. I think it’s somewhere in Hamlet in Purgatory.) Compare the scene where Mufasa tells Simba that when the lions die, their bodies become grass which is eaten by the antelopes. Incredibly, the entire concept of the “circle of life” is based on a morbid soliloquy from Hamlet—“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king.” This is fascinating because the creators of the film are almost certainly not monarchists; they created a monarchist film because that was the natural result of creating a beautiful film. If the movie had problematized the divine right of kings, then it wouldn’t be nearly as wonderful or compelling.

Democracy has an aesthetic, too, but it’s generally much less beautiful than the aesthetic of monarchy. Under monarchy, we can fantasize about the monarch combining wisdom, virtue, and power within a single person; under democracy, it’s just too difficult to imagine that all of our legislators are wise and virtuous. At best, we can fantasize about opposing sides working together to compromise for the good of the country. This is sometimes quite nice—Parks and Recreation, The West Wing, the Simpsons episode “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington,” and numerous campaign ads are good examples—but it’s never phenomenally beautiful. Ideal democracy is also less compelling and efficient than ideal monarchy: “The king speaks and it is so” is more interesting than “Our democratically elected officials argued for a few hours before reaching a compromise.”

As I was writing this post, my friend Jake Wasinger pointed out that I had overlooked the most aesthetically compelling part of democracy: Narratives about protests that begin with ordinary people who succeed in making a positive difference. Selma, The Hate U Give, How to Survive a Plague, Les Misérables, Hamilton, All the President’s Men, and Spotlight are compelling in part because they help the audience to feel like citizens. Ideal monarchy invites us to enjoy the idea of being cared for by a wise sovereign; ideal democracy invites us to feel powerful and then urges us to do something with our power. I agree that this is an important aesthetic advantage that democracy has over monarchy. 

My views about the aesthetic of fascism are more speculative because I don’t spend a lot of time watching fascist media, but my impression is that fascist media depicts a world that is frightening and disordered because no one is powerful enough to prevent evil. The divine monarch is the crown jewel of a well-ordered universe, but the dictator is the only thing standing between his people and an unstoppable threat. Although both aesthetics serve to make absolute rule seem desirable, monarchy accomplishes this by inspiring awe and gratitude, while fascism provokes fear and then offers to resolve that fear. I think that this interpretation fits well with actual Third Reich propaganda as well as more recent fascist media such as Dirty Harry.

(A friend who has read one million Wikipedia articles says that Nazi aesthetics never resolved the tension between “returning to an imagined idealized, idyllic, pastoral past on the one hand and valorizing youth, energy, technology and violence on the other.” This is fascinating. What tensions exist in the aesthetics of contemporary American democracy?)

What do you think, and what should I read next? I think this topic is wonderful, and I’m excited to hear what you think about it.

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1 As I was writing this post, I was surprised by a poll which shows that 5% of Americans think that an American monarchy would be a good thing, and that only 69% said that it would be bad. I’m guessing that most of these people want a symbolic monarchy rather than a true monarchy, but I wonder if true monarchism is also more popular than I thought.^↩

Is Homophobia Easy to Unlearn? (1300 words)

Gay marriage protester (source).

It’s a little strange to be a gay American who was born in 1999. The gay marriage debate peaked right as I was developing political consciousness, and I’m just old enough to remember a time when most Americans opposed it. Gay marriage was the first political issue that I seriously cared about; I read articles from queer news outlets, argued with strangers on Facebook, and frequently discussed LGBT politics with my friends, almost all of whom were also gay, bi, or trans. If Obergefell had happened a couple years earlier, it would have totally rocked my world, but as it happened I was sort of bored with gay marriage when the time finally came in June 2015. I’m among the first gay people to come of age at a time when gay marriage is boringly easy to like.

It’s also strange to know that, by the numbers, many straight people who have been kind and respectful toward me must have held homophobic views for much of their adult lives. I’ve discussed my work about gender identity with numerous philosophers who were between twenty and fifty years older than me, and their comments have been almost universally kind and supportive. (I assume that philosophers who strongly disagree with my work self-selected out of talking to me.) Given that pro-LGBT views were quite unpopular until recently, it’s practically guaranteed that some of these people held anti-LGBT views well into adulthood. Philosophy professors are absolutely farther left than the US population, but I don’t think the gap is big enough that you would expect a huge majority of them to be pro-gay decades before those attitudes became nationally popular (if you’re a professor who started working in the 90s or earlier, let me know if you agree with that impression).

I’m left noticing that people who held homophobic views for years, probably well past middle age in some cases, are nevertheless capable of conveying perfect respect and kindness toward me while we are discussing queer politics. Contrast this with sexist and racist bias, which are apparently so powerful that they afflict people who have never held explicitly sexist or racist views. I agree with the common feminist line of thought which says, roughly, that we acquire sexist bias by engaging with a sexist culture, and that this bias subtly shapes the ways that we judge and interact with other people (and likewise for racial bias). Some people might be completely free of racist and sexist bias, but nobody should be totally confident that they are; if there’s some reason to suspect that my thoughts or actions are the result of implicit bias, then I should take that possibility seriously rather than dismissing it out of hand. If my observations are on the right track, then homophobia is not usually like this. As far as I can tell, a lot of people are free from implicit homophobic bias, or at least their bias is at such a low level that it makes no practical difference. My experience repeatedly confirms that even people who held explicitly homophobic beliefs for much of their lives often show no sign at all that they are biased against gay people. I don’t perceive the slightest condescension or disgust when they speak to me, whereas I do sometimes perceive those responses in people who are currently homophobic. 

My best guess is that homophobic bias is easier to root out because it’s less tied to our immediate perceptions of other people. It’s difficult to even perceive another person without forming an impression of their race and gender, but the same is not true of sexual orientation. Gay people think about sexual orientation a lot, but straight people, and especially homophobic straight people in the 1980s, probably don’t think about it very much at all. When I was an undergraduate, many of my classmates could tell that I was gay because of my voice, but when I worked for a moving company over the summer, my coworkers were shocked to learn that I was gay (this happened at two different moving companies, both in the same region as my university). I doubt that my coworkers actively perceived me as straight very much of the time; rather, I think that they invisibly assumed that I was straight in the same way that I invisibly assume that other people are literate. I would be surprised to learn that it’s not true, but the question never even enters my mind. 

Bias is by far the best explanation for certain patterns of behavior, such as the well-documented tendency for employers to discriminate against applicants with recognizably black names, but it’s usually much harder to determine whether a specific judgment is the result of bias. If a woman perceives her boss as persistently condescending, then it’s a good starting hypothesis that her boss is biased against women. The hypothesis will become stronger if she learns that her female coworkers have similar experiences, and it will become weaker if she learns that the boss is also condescending toward men. My point is that, regardless of what she learns, her initial suspicion is a reasonable guess—implicit sexism is very common, and it would be unsurprising if her boss were condescending toward women specifically.

(That said, bias is not always the right explanation even in cases that seem unambiguous. At one of my summer jobs, an older male coworker repeatedly told me that I should smile more. If I were a woman, then I’m sure I would have thought he was being sexist, and in fact I think that would have been a very reasonable guess. Since I’m not a woman, though, that can’t possibly be the explanation in this particular case.)

When we have a phenomenon to explain—men condescending to women, white students patronizing a black professor—implicit bias is an immediately plausible explanation. If I’m right about my experiences, though, then we should be much slower to posit implicit homophobia as an explanation for someone’s behavior than we are to posit implicit racism or sexism as an explanation. If a straight person is condescending and rude to me, then the best explanation is that he’s a condescending person, and not that he subconsciously perceives me as lesser because I’m gay. This interpretation spares me the moral injury of feeling that I’ve been singled out for abuse, and it also gives me a better understanding of my social environment.

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My argument might stumble on a few points. First, my experience certainly isn’t representative of all gay people. I am a white college graduate, and my observations are based on my discussions with college professors. Since these professors have treated me with respect, it’s very easy to rule out the possibility that they are biased against me because I am gay or because I have a gay voice. It would be much harder to be sure about this if I were in a social group where many people are explicitly homophobic—in that case, how would I tell the difference between implicit bias and deliberate hostility? It's also possible that, even if it's not so bad to be a gay, white (perceptual) man, implicit homophobia could exacerbate other forms of bias—for example, I wouldn't be particularly surprised to learn that queer black professors suffer more condescension than straight ones. I don't know whether that's true, but my experiences certainly don't provide evidence either way. Despite these limitations, I think that my experiences provide some reason for optimism: Homophobia is not as endemic as racism or sexism, and it’s relatively easy to create social groups where it basically doesn’t exist.

What do you think? I’d really like to hear about your experience. Understanding this problem will require us to integrate multiple limited perspectives, including the experiences of queer people in different social networks, queer people at different levels of social privilege, and even straight people. The goal of this post has been to lay out the problem and to contribute my own experiences as a data point, but I fully expect that I've overlooked points that will seem obvious to other people. 

Benevolent Epistemology (600 words)

Guan Yin, The Boddhisatva Who Contemplates the Sound of the World

[Note: I think this is less interesting than my other posts. If you're still deciding whether you like me, try my posts about homophobic belief or the Catholic baptism crisis.]

In an earlier post, I described sadistic epistemology, a state of mind in which “whatever I can weaponize is true.” The sadist goes through a “seeking phase” in which they rapidly survey possible beliefs, followed by a “kill phase” in which they adopt a belief specifically because it’s a good weapon. Sadistic epistemology is a corollary to Natalie Wynn’s concept of masochistic epistemology, a state of mind in which the masochist is motivated to believe things that hurt them. 

Benevolent epistemology is a pattern of thought in which the benevolent person is motivated to consider beliefs that reflect well on another person, relative to other beliefs they might have endorsed. Maybe I notice that I’ve entered the sadistic seeking phase, but I restrain myself before entering kill phase. Mean and uncharitable beliefs flash before my mind, but I refuse to endorse them until I’ve thought things through. In most cases, I’ll realize that my most critical thoughts are wrong, and I’ll settle on something which is not only gentler but also more likely to be true. (“Non-malevolent” might be a better word than “benevolent” here.) I go through a similar process when I hear uncharitable criticism of another person: Faced with a brutal interpretation of someone’s actions, I go through a benevolent seeking phase in which I rapidly consider interpretations that place that person in a more positive light.

I’ve trained myself to enter the benevolent mindset partly for ethical reasons: It’s usually worse to judge people too harshly than it is to judge them too leniently, so it’s good to be somewhat biased in favor of non-judgmental beliefs. I also think that, if you’re biased against harsh interpretations, you will actually be right a larger portion of the time. The harshest interpretations of a person’s behavior are almost never true. We like interesting explanations, and we also like inflicting pain on people we dislike, so we’re very good at finding vicious beliefs that aren’t supported by our best evidence. By training myself to resist the most vicious beliefs that occur to me (or beliefs that are widely accepted among my peers), I make it easier for myself to notice better explanations that I would otherwise have overlooked—that you acted out of ignorance rather than malice, that you thought you were helping, that what you were doing didn’t seem that bad from the inside, and so on. Often, once I’ve shut down the sadistic impulse within myself, the vicious belief seems totally incredible; it only seemed like a possibility because of my anger or my fear of being criticized.

Although I think that benevolent epistemology is usually a great tool for evaluating other people more fairly, I will note that selective benevolence can be epistemically dangerous. I used to be overly gentle with people in my political circles: If someone “on my side” was being mean and wrong, then I would invent a ludicrously charitable interpretation of their actions so that they would come off reasonably well, and then I would honestly believe that my interpretation was true. This is the point at which benevolent epistemology ceases to be a helpful tool and becomes just another kind of motivated reasoning. There’s not a completely clear line between useful and harmful uses of charity, but this is a good heuristic: If it would feel good for me to believe that you’re evil and stupid, then I should force myself to consider the possibility that you’re nice and smart. On the other hand, if it would hurt me to accept a criticism of you, then I should be a little more worried that I’m letting you off the hook too easily.

Is the Pope Catholic? (600 words)

The Baptism of Christ, 13th-century illumination.

[Epistemic status: I might be missing something crucial. If I learn that I’m wrong about Catholic doctrine or history, I’ll revise the post. [EDIT: It turned out that I was, so I have.]]

The Catholic Church recently determined that thousands of baptisms are invalid because an Arizona priest made one persistent error while giving the sacrament. The one-word error–a substitution of “we” for “I” in the statement, “I baptize you in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”–not only invalidated the baptisms that Fr. Andres Arango himself performed, but also baptisms performed by other clergy whom Arango had baptized. [NOTE: I was wrong about this. Somehow I strongly remember learning that this was true, but when a commenter told me that I was wrong, I failed to find any sources that confirmed my memory. This error throws off the rest of the post, but I'll recalibrate at the end.] The Diocese of Phoenix has taken pains to contact people whose baptisms might be invalid and to help them to arrange legitimate baptisms. 

What interests me most about this situation is that it seems to imply that any baptism at all could be invalid because of an error made in the distant past. Fr. Andres’ error was only detected after he had made it consistently for sixteen years; it’s extremely likely that some historical priests made comparable errors but were never discovered. How many Catholic baptisms are invalid because they are performed by a priest who was baptized by a priest who was baptized by a priest (...) who mispronounced Latin in the 12th century? If one priest could perform thousands of invalid baptisms in only sixteen years, how many invalid baptisms must have cascaded from errors long past? Given that there are well over a billion Catholics, I think the answer must be at least in the tens of millions. Unless I’m misunderstanding the doctrine–certainly a significant possibility–then I’m not sure that any Catholics are justified in being confident that their baptisms are valid. 

Fortunately, church officials and theologians have confirmed that affected persons…probably won’t go to hell if they were illegitimately baptized. ABC quotes a Catholic theologian as saying that “God isn’t constrained by the errors that a priest might make,” and the Diocese of Phoenix writes that “We can be assured that all who approached God, our Father, in good faith to receive the sacraments did not walk away empty-handed.” Still, I feel that the Church has sent mixed messages on this point, as the Diocese of Phoenix also stresses that “Baptism is necessary for salvation…The Church does not know of any means other than Baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude” (emphasis weirdly in original). My sense is that leaders agree that it wouldn’t make sense for someone affected by a sacramental error to be denied salvation, but that they aren’t sure how else to unpack the idea that baptism is crucial for being a legitimate Catholic. 

In the absence of immaculate historical data, we can’t verify that any living person, including clergy, has an unblemished baptismal pedigree. So I close by asking: Is the pope legitimately Catholic? It’s an honest question. 

[EDIT: As Isaac points out below, Fr. Andres' error does not invalidate baptisms performed by priests he baptized. The CDF decision still opens the possibility that many baptisms could be invalid for other reasons, but the probability is much lower than I argued in the original post. Isaac points out that if one or a few historical bishops received false baptisms, then that could indirectly invalidate many other baptisms up through the present day, but since there have been many fewer bishops than priests, that scenario is much less likely than the one I imagined. I enjoyed thinking through this problem even though the truth isn't as funny as I hoped.]