Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine, and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph, and this is Pines of the Quines.

In this episode, I want to ask what may seem to you like a silly question, but which is a question St. Thomas of Quines asked and answered, namely, whether you can baptize a child against the will of the child's parents.

And that might seem like a silly curiosity, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, which I would submit to you as not a silly curiosity, but moving on.

But it also reveals something about the dispensation of salvation, which helps us to live our lives in the setting of God's Providence, abandoned to His good, good will.

So, I think it's worth asking, so let's get after. Here we go.

Okay, at the beginning of the Sumitheology, St. Thomas of Quines says that he's going to get rid of all unnecessary questions or useless repetitions, because he's read the theology textbook of his day, and he's found that they can be burdensome.

Or at the very least, they can be trying of one's patience. So, he's going to arrange sacred theology in a meaningful order, which corresponds to the order of God's revelation and grace, so that we can enter in.

And he's just going to kind of pair it down. That might sound ironic to you when you look at the Sumitheology on the shelf.

It's a big old book. Here's my one volume Sumitheology in Latin. It's a decent-sized book. Look at that. My automatic focus was not totally bewildered by that experience, cheers.

But this particular question, St. Thomas actually asks twice in almost exactly the same term. So, either if you got that he had answered it already, or he thought it was so cool that he answered it twice.

But again, the question is whether you can baptize an infant of non-Christian parents without the permission of the aforementioned parents.

And it gets into some interesting conflicts when we think about it in terms of what's at stake and how are we going to attain the aforementioned things that are at stake.

And because on the one hand, we as Christians have a strong sense of the necessity of baptism.

When we think about necessity for salvation, we think first, if you're going to be saved by Christ in His church, and the ordinary means whereby one comes into the communion of the church in relationship with Christ is through baptism.

So, we talk about baptism as necessary for salvation. Now mind you, God is not bound to the sacraments, and people can participate in sacramental graces.

Even without receiving the actual sacramental form. So, he'll talk about, St. Thomas will talk about baptism of what we call desire, or like baptism of blood.

So, like a Catechuman, for instance, on the way to the Easter vigil might be said to participate the grace of baptism if he were killed in a car accident, or the martyr who dies for faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, even without receiving baptism.

Though he didn't tend to receive baptism in due course where he could survive, we could say that that person might participate in the grace of the sacrament as well.

So, yes, the graces themselves aren't bound to the sacraments or limited to the sacraments, but they are stably associated with the sacraments, they are dispensed ordinarily by the sacraments.

Okay, so, that's what we're thinking about. On the one hand, baptism is super important, it's necessary for salvation, but on the other hand, the parents retain their parental rights.

So, God in His providence has it such that this child is born to these parents. That's not a mistake, that's not an accident, that's not something that God failed to foresee, that's not something that God forgot.

Okay, so, this child is born to these parents, and these parents aren't Christian, and these parents might not have the intention of converting to the faith anytime soon or being received into communion anytime soon.

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