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.]