What Are You Looking For? Part 1: The Nicene Creed

I Confess One Baptism for the Forgiveness of Sins

I Confess One Baptism for the Forgiveness of Sins

            In the Roman Catholic Church, there are two major kinds of sin.  One kind is Actual Sin, which could be either Mortal or Venial.  A Mortal Sin is a grave offense against God.  An example would be murdering someone.  Mortal Sins are the “biggies”.  They are those things that are done which rupture the relationship between us and God. 

            Venial Sins are those little every day type of sins.  These things won’t rupture your relationship with God, but they’re not the best examples of Christian charity either.  Like calling the driver that just decided to exit the freeway from the hammer lane right in front of you a blithering idiot.  Even if the evidence in support of your observation is overwhelming, he (or she) is created by God just like you are, therefore you shouldn’t call her (or him) an idiot.

            Then there is Original Sin.  Original Sin is the sin that is passed on to every human being courtesy of Adam and Eve.  They were created without original sin.  It was one of the things they inherited as a result of the Fall.  There are only two people who were born without the stain of original sin in all of human history.  The first is Jesus.  As the sinless Son of God, he was born without original sin.  The other is his mother, Mary.  “The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin.” (CCC 491) 

Why was it necessary for the Blessed Virgin Mary to not have the stain of original sin?  Given what we know of DNA, for example, could you imagine if Jesus was sinless on his Divine Father’s side, but had original sin passed to him on his mother’s side.  He would have needed to save himself before he could save anyone else.  The only way for him to be sinless would be for both of his parents, the Blessed Virgin Mary and God the Father to be sinless.  Not just one of them.

By now you are probably wondering what all of this has to do with baptism.  It is simple.  “I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.”  In the Catholic Church, baptism is a Sacrament, which is the area of the Catechism we’ll begin looking at next.  In fact, baptism is the first Sacrament.  It is the base upon which all the others are built.  “’When we made our first profession of faith while receiving the holy Baptism that cleansed us, the forgiveness we received then was so full and complete that  there remained in us absolutely nothing left to efface, neither original sin nor offenses committed by our own will, nor was there left any penalty to suffer in order to expiate them.” (CCC 978)

Because baptism cleanses from all sin, including original sin, it should only be performed once in any person’s life, as long as it was validly performed, “in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”.  Once the stain of original sin is gone, it’s gone forever.  “Baptism seals the Christian with the indelible spiritual mark of his belonging to Christ.”  (CCC 1271) That’s not to say that we don’t still sin on occasion.  We still have concupiscence (man’s disordered inclination to sin) that we have to battle every day.  There’s a different Sacrament for that.

That’s why we confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.  Once original sin is erased; once the soul is indelibly marked as Christ’s, there is no need for more than one baptism.  That’s why Jesus commanded his apostle’s, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.  Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved;” (Mark 16: 15-16a NABRE)