The Vision of Baptism
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Over the past several decades, Catholic social teaching has begun to address mental illness—and for good reason. Approximately 2.6 million people in the United States and 24 million worldwide live with schizophrenia, a brain disease marked by symptoms such as alteration of the senses, hallucinations, delusions, and decreased motivation. Another 1.9 million people in the United States and 37 million worldwide live with bipolar disorder. They cycle between the euphoric, increased functioning of the illness’s manic phase and the despondent, decreased functioning of its depressive phase. Though medication can alleviate some of the symptoms of each, medication noncompliance is rampant.
Worse, people with mental illness are routinely marginalized by misunderstandings about the nature of mental illness; unjust laws, policies, and social structures; inhospitable or overwhelmed communities; and troubling cultural values, norms, and scripts. The inaccessibility of adequate psychiatric health care often leads those with mental illness to cycle through penal and judicial systems that are ill-equipped to handle their needs. Incarcerated and homeless, they perpetrate or suffer from violence. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and stigma compound their marginalization and are costly for them, their loved ones, the Church, and the nation. The stakes are dire: approximately 40 percent of people with schizophrenia and 20 percent of people with bipolar disorder continue to suffer from acute symptoms of their illness throughout their entire lives.
Theologically speaking, we can say that people with mental illness are too often “de-baptized”—excluded from communities such as families, friend groups, churches, and society at large. Of course, part of the problem is that mental illness can complicate the activities that facilitate social incorporation and belonging (conversation, cooperation with others, adherence to norms, “getting” humor, forming and maintaining relationships, being able to work a job, etc.). Even the best-intentioned loved ones might struggle to relate to the person they knew before the onset of illness, and even the most hospitable of parishes might struggle to fully welcome those suffering from mental illness. The sensory aspects of Catholic liturgy can also prove difficult for people with over-acute senses due to schizophrenia, and messages of hope and healing can ring hollow for someone who seems forever stuck in depression.
Even more significant problems arise when malformed people shamefully exploit illness for their own amusement, or when mental illness instills denial, resentment, and shame among families and parishes. Too often, Christians do not welcome people with mental illness into their communities—or recognize that they are already members of those communities. Too often, mental illness has been regarded as a sign of insufficient faith and “treated” via exorcism—a pernicious tendency that has continued into the twenty-first century despite admirable efforts by magisterial teachings to indict this spiritualization of mental illness. The Church’s treatment of those with mental illness is all the more pressing given the way they are often neglected or mistreated by government and civil society—whether they are actively harmed and killed or passively abandoned and left for dead.
What does Catholic social teaching say in response to these challenges? Magisterial teaching has consistently affirmed the intrinsic, indelible dignity of people with mental illness. Doing so has enabled the magisterium to set an ethical floor below which no person ought to be allowed to sink. This floor has admirably protected the vulnerable, but there is more to do. The longstanding attention to social ethics in magisterial teachings—especially by the U.S. bishops—has been supplemented of late by an emerging interest in the agency, virtue, and flourishing of people with mental illness.
A theology of baptism can contribute much to this discourse, especially insofar as this sacrament holds together the social-ethical and agential dimensions of existing teachings. Baptism offers an alternate vision in which people with serious mental illness are integral to the Catholic community, not just as patients but as agents. Baptism requires Catholics to respect the dignity of people with serious mental illness and to treat them with solidarity, justice, and love. This includes welcoming, befriending, and advocating for improved policies for and with them.
But it doesn’t end there. Baptism also requires people with mental illness to live with faith, hope, and love as best they can. Of course, it’s important to recognize that serious mental illness can and does complicate the possibilities for virtuous agency. Yet at the threshold point of clinical recovery—when the rationality and volition compromised by mental illness have been sufficiently restored—challenges to virtuous living from mental illness begin to decrease.
A theology of baptism shows how and why people with mental illness can, in fact, live with these virtues, despite the difficulties involved in doing so. As a sacrament, baptism mediates God’s unconditional, gratuitous love. Insofar as faith, hope, and love are God’s freely given gifts, no mental illness—and no finite reality, for that matter—can circumscribe God’s giving of these virtues to his beloved. Baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection is a reminder that neither death nor the challenges described above can entirely foreclose the possibilities of new, resurrected life for people with mental illness. Whereas many communities are based on a form of conditional love unavailable to those with mental illness, baptism, rightly understood, initiates them into a community from which they cannot be expelled.
By distinguishing sacramental truth from psychological truth, a theology of baptism can also help us avoid the trap of spiritualizing mental illness. The gift of grace through baptism does not repair the psychological conditions associated with mental illness. God’s gifts of faith, hope, and love are not a divine “zapping” that fixes everything. Rather, people with mental illness have the agency to cooperate with God’s ongoing activity in their lives.
The theology of baptism helps ground the social-ethical claims of magisterial teachings and uncovers latent possibilities in these teachings’ approach to the virtuous agency and flourishing of those suffering from mental illness. Put another way, this understanding of baptism supports the ethical floor that people with mental illness need and invites us to think more daringly about the grace-filled heights to which they can ascend.
This article was published alongside two others in a
symposium about the Church and mental illness. The other contributions
can be found here:
“Just Policing” by Tobias Winright
“The Idol of Autonomy” by Meg Kaveny
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