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The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives us the most important reasons why we must <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/infant-baptism">baptize infants</a>:
<blockquote>
Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth in baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called. The sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation is particularly manifest in infant baptism. The Church and the parents would deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confer baptism shortly after birth (CCC 1250).
</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/to-explain-infant-baptism-you-must-explain-original-sin">Original sin</a> is a reality from which each and every human person desperately needs to be freed. Biblically speaking, Romans 5:12 is remarkably clear on this point:
<blockquote>
Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned.
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Even if nothing else was <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/to-explain-infant-baptism-you-must-explain-original-sin">said in Scripture</a> implying infant baptism, we could conclude it to be necessary just from this simple fact: babies need to have original sin removed from their souls.
But there is more.
St. Paul, being a Jew, as well as all of the apostles, understood the idea that true religion is a family affair. A Jew became a Jew when he was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth. They did not have to first “accept Moses as their personal prophet” before they could be circumcised. And according to Paul, baptism is the fulfillment of circumcision:
<blockquote>
In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ. . . . You were buried with him in baptism (Col. 2:11-12).
</blockquote>
The Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition, which I quoted above, has the word &#8220;and&#8221; placed between “Christ” and “you were buried.” I left it out because it is not in the original Greek text. The Greek indicates that baptism is the circumcision of Christ!
This seems trivial to us today. Okay, so baptism is the “circumcision of Christ.” But this was not trivial to first-century Jewish Christians who were being challenged to circumcise their children “after the manner of Moses or else they could not be saved” (see Acts 15:1-2). Many were being persecuted because they chose infant baptism instead of infant circumcision. As Paul says in Romans 2:28:
<blockquote>
For he is not a real Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. He is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal.
</blockquote>
What is this “spiritual circumcision” of which Paul speaks? Baptism, according to Colossians 2:11-12. Not the shedding of foreskin, but the transformation of the inward man through the sacrament. As a fulfillment of that which is only a type, baptism does something circumcision could never do: &#8220;baptism now saves&#8221; us (1 Pet. 3:21). The change that occurs is not physical; it is spiritual. As it is often said, what you don’t see is what you get in all of the sacraments, baptism included—and infant baptism included, too.
Elsewhere in Scripture we find a close association between baptism and circumcision. In Galatians 3:27-28, Paul says:
<blockquote>
For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
</blockquote>
Paul&#8217;s point is that baptism is more inclusive than its Old Testament antecedent. You had to be a free, male Jew to be circumcised. And when were males generally circumcised in the Old Testament, by the way? At eight days after birth (Gen. 17:12). Paul’s point is that in the New Testament, baptism is open to all. Of course babies would be included.
This idea of baptism as the circumcision of Christ, therefore opening up the legitimacy of infant baptism, is at least implied in other biblical texts as well. You&#8217;ll recall that on Pentecost, Peter preached to thousands of Jews, who already had an understanding of their faith involving a family covenant, and said, &#8220;Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. . . . For the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off, everyone whom the Lord calls to him&#8221; (Acts 2:38-39).
If Peter believed that baptism is exclusive to adults, he was a terrible teacher!
The Lord explicitly &#8220;called infants&#8221; to himself in Luke 18:15-17:
<blockquote>
Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them; and when the disciple saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”
</blockquote>
These were not just children who were being brought to Jesus. The Greek word here is brephe, which mean &#8220;infants.&#8221; And again, the Jews listening would understand that the parent’s belief and obedience suffices for the child until he is old enough to own his faith. The parents bringing children to Christ, according to Christ, is equivalent to the children coming to him on their own. Moreover, because babies are icons of what we all should be—that is, they put up no obstacles to the work of God in their lives, and they can most obviously do absolutely nothing to merit anything from God—infant baptism makes sense, as they are reminders of “the sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation” (CCC 1250).
From the very beginning, whole “households” received baptism. There is no reason to believe that infants would not have been included (see Acts 11:14; 16:15, 33; 18:8; 1 Cor. 1:16). For brevity&#8217;s sake, I will use just one of the five examples cited in that parenthesis. I encourage all reading this to take a look at the other four examples as well.
When Paul led the Philippian jailer to Christ in Acts 16, he said to him, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household” (Acts 16:31). He does not say that all in his household must first believe. He simply says they will all be saved. How could he say that? Paul seems to have understood what St. Peter had already preached back when Paul was still persecuting Christians (in Acts 2:38). The promise of faith and baptism is for the jailer and his children.
Jesus said, “He that believes and is baptized shall be saved” in Mark 16:16. Many claim this to mean that faith must precede baptism. And this would seem to exclude infants as possible candidates for baptism. Seems airtight. Can an infant possess faith? No. Therefore, a baby cannot be licitly baptized.
Although this argument may sound convincing on the surface, it does not survive serious scrutiny. First, Jesus did not say faith must precede baptism for an individual. He simply said one has to believe and be baptized in order to be saved. He said nothing about the two having to be accomplished in that order for the individual.
Moreover, even if we were to accept as fact that faith must come first, even though Mark 16:16 does not say that, this would not exclude the possibility that the faith of the parents suffices until the child reaches the age of accountability.
Second, a strict reading of Mark 16:16 has devastating consequences. A baby cannot believe. Does that mean that all babies who die without believing will not be saved? Of course not! The thief on the cross was presumably not baptized. Does that mean he would not go to heaven? Of course not! Belief and baptism are necessary to those who have the opportunity to obtain them. If they were to be impeded from being able to believe or be baptized, and that could be the case for many different reasons, then God would judge them in accordance with what they were responsible for.
This last point gets to another reason why infant baptism is so important. Sometimes we are accountable not just for ourselves, but for others as well (see Ezek. 3:18-19). Parents are responsible for baptizing their babies. If they knowingly do not do so, they break God&#8217;s covenant in a serious matter. Like the paralytic in Matthew 9:2-6 who was completely dependent upon others to bring him to Christ in order for him to get his sins forgiven (and his physical healing), a baby is completely dependent upon his parents to bring him to Christ.
And notice as well that it was the faith of those who brought the paralytic to Christ that God used instrumentally for the paralytic&#8217;s salvation: “When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven’” (v. 2). Whose faith did Jesus &#8220;see&#8221; here? “Their” seems to refer back to the “they” of the same verse: “And behold, they brought to him a paralytic . . .”
The faith of the parents suffices when they bring their infant to be blessed by Christ via &#8220;the circumcision of Christ.&#8221;
Paul clearly teaches that circumcision never justified anyone, at least in the sense of the initial gift of justification. “We say that faith was reckoned to Abraham . . . before he was circumcised” (Rom. 4:9-10). So doesn’t this prove that baptism does not save us, either?
Three points:
First, as I said above, baptism is the fulfillment of that which was only a type in the Old Testament. The fulfillment is always more glorious than the type. Thus, “baptism does now save you” (1 Pet. 3:21) in a way that circumcision could not.
Second, it is true that Abraham and David were Paul’s two examples of justifying grace occurring apart from circumcision in Romans 4. And yet, Abraham instituted circumcision by divine mandate, and David was, in fact, circumcised as a little baby. Indeed, God also declared in the Old Testament that &#8220;any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant&#8221; (Gen. 17:14). It is not a contradiction to say both faith and circumcision were necessary to remain within God’s covenant in the Old Testament, even though circumcision played no role in initial justification.
Third, the faith of the parents sufficed when it came to circumcising a child. Do we not see that principle in the New Testament as well? Jesus saw the faith of the friends of the paralytic and healed the paralytic in Matthew 9:2. When people cannot have faith, the faith of family or friends suffices. So it is with infant baptism. The faith of the parents sanctifies the children, as Paul says in 1 Cor. 7:14. This is just as much a New Testament concept as it is an Old Testament concept.
So if you have the Faith, and you&#8217;re on the fence about baptizing your baby . . . wonder no longer. Baptize him!

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Ask Me Anything

When it comes to love, English is impoverished. It’s not that English-speakers don’t love but that our language is so limited. “I love God,” “I love my wife,” “I love chocolate ice cream” all use the same verb, but that word cannot mean the same thing in all three cases.
Sociologists speak of the Sapir-Whorf thesis. Put simply, it explains differences in language based on users’ need, which, reciprocally, shape or limit the speaker’s way of seeing reality. Like “love,” English has one word for that white powdery thing that falls from the sky: “snow.” Eskimo languages, by contrast, have many words for snow. English has to approximate them by multiplying adjectives. Muruaneq is “soft, deep snow,” which is different from ughugesnaq, “wet snow that is falling”—each of which will require different actions to get home. A quick but precise noun conceptualizes X and distinguishes it from Y, enabling rapid life decisions.
So why is English a one-word “love” language?
C.S. Lewis wrote a book called The Four Loves, which explains the four Greek words for “love.” They range from attraction (including physical attraction) to affection (emotional attraction) to friendship to benevolence.
I’m stressing the differences in “love” because it’s relevant to an image I want to discuss from another C.S. Lewis book, The Great Divorce. It has to do with “love” as eros and its deformation in lust.
The Great Divorce discusses the dead who come from a “city” on a bus trip to the outskirts of heaven. The identity of that “city” is fluid: for those who, on their heavenly peripheries day trip, are attracted to stay, it is purgatory. For those who choose to take the return bus, it’s hell.
Don’t be surprised that the return bus is usually full. One of the tragic consequences of the mystery of sin is that, having grown accustomed to it, we feel naked and insecure without its familiarity. It’s like that natty, worn out sweater with holes that should have been thrown out long ago but you still wear because “it feels good.”
I was particularly gripped by a scene in which an angel encounters a soul with a lizard on its neck. The soul is headed back to the bus. He’s a little put off by the angel’s presence because he knows that the reptile—which symbolizes lust—has not kept its promise. The lizard promised not to keep whispering dirty ideas into his ear, since the soul knows that “his stuff won’t do here,” but it “won’t stop.” So the soul is ready to take his inappropriate companion and go back to hell.
The angel proposes another way, albeit by steps.
“Would you like me to make him quiet?” The soul seems enthusiastic about the prospect.
“Then I will kill it.”
But, on approaching them, the soul already feels uncomfortable. “You’re burning me,” the soul bellows, “retreating.” When the angel asks whether the soul really wants the pest killed, the latter begins to temporize. “You didn’t say anything about killing him at first.” That’s so “drastic.” All the soul wanted was lust’s “silence,” not necessarily its separation. And he wanted its “silence” because, well, its overt visibility is “so damned embarrassing.”
The angel isn’t diverted. “May I kill it?” The soul parries: let’s talk “later.” Really, thank you, didn’t mean to be a bother. See you.
But the angel doesn’t give up. “There’s no time.” Now is the time (literally, since heaven is the eternal now).
The soul keeps multiplying excuses. “I shall be able to keep it in order now.” A “gradual process” is better than a nip in the bud. I’ll feel better about it tomorrow.
In the end, the soul admits its fear: in killing it, you’ll kill me. The angel assures the soul that’s not true. But “you’re hurting me now.” The angel is clear: “I never said it wouldn’t hurt you. I said it wouldn’t kill you.”
In the end, after further hemming and hawing, the soul finally musters himself enough to agree. As the angel’s hand approaches, lust grows louder, pleading, “You’ll be without me for ever and ever. It’s not natural!” At last, in the end, comes the soul’s decision: “Damn you and blast you! Go on . . . get it over. Do what you like. God help me. God help me.” (He will!)
The angel then plucks the lizard from the soul’s shoulder and fatally twists its neck. At the same time, the soul “gave a scream of agony such as I had never heard on earth.”
What then happens is amazing.
The soul begins to grow in stature, “not much smaller than the Angel.” His beauty emerges.
The lizard, too, changes. From an ugly reptile emerges a vigorous white stallion, which the soul approaches and nuzzles. Then the soul hops on its back and, together, both ride off to the mountains—the heights—of heaven.
Human beings are sensory creatures. The world comes to us through our senses, including touch (which includes sex). Eros is that love which most directly affects the senses. It is powerful. It gives us “lust” for life and love. It drives us forward.
In itself, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/better-than-sex">eros is very good</a>. It’s when its power is directed in the wrong ways that the powerful stallion becomes the creepy lizard hanging on our necks.
St. Augustine was an erotic man. His misdirected eros led to many sins and wasted years. But when his lizard was killed, he became a saint whose spiritual vigor outdid many.
Catholicism does not ask we deny the senses. It does ask that we put them in the service of the good. The failure to control them leads to lust; their discipline supports love. “Love” and “lust” are not cousins. They are just two four letter words.
Our sensual world confuses them. One example: think of the wreckage pornography brings to so many lives, damage that seems irreparable. And think of its ubiquity, along with the sexualization (“pornification”) of our world.
Now, imagine what great saints would arise if that eros were channeled into true love instead of lust. If we stopped making excuses and snuggling in our sins. If, by God’s grace, we cast off the lizard and mounted the white stallion.
Our Lady, Queen of Purity, pray for us!

Lust Is Not Love’s Cousin

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People celebrate every St. Valentine’s Day using heart shapes. Greeting cards bear them, cakes and candies are made in this shape, and they’re used as decorations on anything connected with the holiday.
The shape—usually red, with two round lobes at the top and a point at the bottom—is idealized and only approximates what a human heart looks like. But how common it is raises a question for the modern mind: Why do we use it this way?
At least in the secular sphere, Valentine’s Day celebrates romantic love, but in modern medicine, the heart is just a set of muscles that rhythmically contract to push blood around inside our bodies. What’s the connection?
The answer, as you might expect, goes back quite a ways. People have always known the organs of the body. Between cutting up animals and cutting up other people, they were quite familiar with them. But they didn’t always understand their functions.
For example, today we associate thought with the brain. This is known as the cephalocentric (“head-centered”) hypothesis, but this view wasn’t dominant in history.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) was one of the best anatomists in the ancient world. He noted all the blood vessels around the brain and concluded that its function was to allow the blood from the heart to cool down (On the Parts of Animals 2:7). The brain was, in essence, a heat management organ.
On the other hand, there seemed to be a direct connection between the heart and mental phenomena. If you’re seized by a strong emotion—love, lust, fear, anxiety, excitement—your heart speeds up. In the absence of such emotion, it slows down.
Sometimes—particularly at moments of peak emotion—your heart may even “skip a beat.” (Technically, one chamber beats early, before it’s fully filled with blood, so you don’t feel the beat; then it over-fills as the normal cycle reasserts itself, and you feel a more pronounced thump.)
It thus became natural for people to associate the heart with mental functions like emotions and intellect. This is known as the cardiocentric (“heart-centered”) hypothesis.
Several other factors may have also contributed to this view, such as the fact the heart is hidden (like our mental functions), that it is at the center of our bodies’ extensions (suggesting it’s important), and that if it stops working, you die (associated with the spirit leaving).
Whatever the factors, the idea that the heart is the seat of the mind was common in ancient cultures. Thus, when the ancient Egyptians mummified you, they kept your heart inside your body, but they took out the brain so that its moisture wouldn’t cause the body to rot. This would have been done for the two ancient Israelites who we know were mummified, the patriarchs Jacob and Joseph (Gen. 50:2-3, 26).
The Israelites also accepted the cardiocentric model. Thus, a man is said to rejoice “in his heart” (Exod. 4:14) or to have his heart “broken” (Ps. 69:20)—an expression we still use today. Angry people have their hearts grow hot (Ps. 39:3), and hearts “melt” with fear (Deut. 20:8). The heart is the seat of courage (2 Chron. 17:6), and God may fulfill the “heart’s desire” (Ps. 21:2).
In addition to the heart being seen as the place of these emotions, it was also seen as the seat of the intellect. Thus, before the Flood, God saw “that every imagination of the thoughts of [man’s] heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5), and when Abraham heard the prophecy of Isaac’s birth, he laughed to himself and “in his heart” said, “Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?” (17:17). This mode of language is even applied to God himself, for after the Flood, “the Lord said in his heart” that he would not curse the ground again because of man (8:21).
The cardiocentric model continued to be used in the New Testament. The heart is still spoken of as the seat of emotions. Thus, Paul tells the Colossians to sing “with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col. 3:16), and he tells the Thessalonians that he wishes God will “encourage your hearts” (2 Thess. 2:17).
The heart is similarly envisioned as the seat of the intellect. Thus, Simeon prophesies that through Jesus, the “thoughts from many hearts may be revealed” (Luke 2:35), and when the disciples argue about who is the greatest, Jesus knows “the thoughts of their hearts” (9:47).
The image of the heart continued to be prominent in the post-apostolic age. After the year 1000, devotion began to grow to the heart of Jesus. A prominent example is the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/how-you-can-personally-console-jesus-in-gethsemane">Sacred Heart of Jesus</a> devotion revealed to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque between 1673 and 1675. This devotion depicts Jesus’ heart surrounded by flames of love, with a crown of thorns and a cross above it, and a solemnity commemorating the Sacred Heart is celebrated on the third Friday after Pentecost.
Ordinary people continue to use language based on the cardiocentric model today, such as when we say that someone is “big-hearted,” “cold-hearted,” or “tender-hearted.” We may say that someone has a “heart of gold” or a “heart of stone,” or that he is a “bleeding heart.” People “learn things by heart.” And of course, the Grinch’s “heart was two sizes too small.”
We do this without even thinking about it, the same way we speak of the sun rising and setting despite what Copernicus and Galileo had to say. For us ordinary individuals, this doesn’t raise much of an issue. The presence of the cardiocentric model in folk expressions is no big deal.
But what about when it appears in Scripture or Church documents—like those approving the Sacred Heart devotion? Does it conflict with the cephalocentric model that regards the head rather than the heart as the seat of mental activity?
The cephalocentric model also has a long history. It actually pre-dates Aristotle, having been proposed by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras around 550 B.C. Fans of the theory included Aristotle’s teacher Plato and the Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen, so it’s not as if the idea was absent from Western thought.
Following the Scientific Revolution, evidence mounted that the brain is more associated with thought than the heart, and by the early 1800s, neuroscience had developed to the point that cephalocentrism was firmly established.
The Church knew this, and so in 1899, Pope Leo XIII explained the Sacred Heart in symbolic terms, stating that “there is in the Sacred Heart a symbol and a sensible image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love one another” and that “whatever honor, veneration, and love is given to this divine heart is really and truly given to Christ himself” (Annum Sacrum 8).
Similarly, in 2024, Pope Francis stated that “devotion to the heart of Christ is not the veneration of a single organ apart from the Person of Jesus. What we contemplate and adore is the whole Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, represented by an image that accentuates his heart. That heart of flesh is seen as the privileged sign of the inmost being of the incarnate Son and his love, both divine and human. More than any other part of his body, the heart of Jesus is the natural sign and symbol of his boundless love” (Dilexit Nos 48).
What about the Bible? Does the cardiocentric language it uses mean that the biblical authors didn’t understand the role of the brain and the heart? They lived before the Scientific Revolution, so they would not be expected to, and that’s not a problem from the perspective of biblical theology.
The Second Vatican Council taught, “Since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully, and without error that truth that God wanted put into sacred writings” (Dei Verbum 11).
It also taught, “For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking, and narrating that prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another” (op. cit. 12).
We therefore must distinguish between what the biblical authors assumed to be the case and what they were asserting by the language they used. When Luke says that Jesus knew “the thought of [the disciples’] hearts” (Luke 9:47), he’s asserting that Jesus knew their thoughts, not that these thoughts were literally housed in their hearts.
We don’t know which school of thought Luke subscribed to. As an ancient physician, he may have been a cardiocentrist or a cephalocentrist, but either way, it was normal for people of his day to speak of thoughts as coming from the heart—as is often the case for us today. In any event, Luke is not trying to teach us a medical theory; he’s telling us that Jesus knew what the disciples thought, and this assertion—not any background assumptions in the way it is expressed—is what is guaranteed to be true.
On the other hand, we shouldn’t be too quick to assume a strict correlation between the brain and mental phenomena. In the first place, there’s what’s known as “the little brain in the heart,” or the intrinsic cardiac nervous system (ICNS). It’s about forty thousand neurons that help regulate the heart’s activity, and things like a racing heart can affect emotional states (e.g., by causing fear and panic).
Even more surprisingly, there is evidence from heart transplant surgeries that something more than the physical organ—at least information—is being passed between patients. In one example, neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hearts-Code-Tapping-Wisdom-Energy/dp/0767900952">recounts the cases</a> of men he refers to as Jim and Frank. Jim had bad lungs and received a heart-lung transplant. However, Jim’s own heart was still good and was given to Frank. After the transplant, Frank’s personality changed to be more like Jim’s, Frank began exhibiting Jim’s food preferences, and during intimate moments Frank began calling his wife by the name of Jim’s wife (123-124).
Ultimately, neither the heart nor the brain may be essential for mental activity. Consistent with Christian teaching on life after death, the evidence of near-death experiences reveals that people continue to have conscious experiences even during cardiac arrest, when the heart has ceased beating and brain activity goes offline within seconds. Yet people in this condition accurately report things happening around their physical bodies and even in other rooms of hospitals that they have no sensory access to.
All of this serves as a warning against reductionistic theories that would too closely tie the mind and emotions to physical organs like the heart and the brain. Given the complexity of what we observe, this whole area is—as it was in biblical days—a mystery.

The Heart, the Bible, and Science