The
Minister of Baptism and the Baptism of Desire
By your
letter, you prudently informed me that a certain Jew, when he was at the point
of death and because he lived only among Jews, immersed himself in water while
saying: “I baptize myself in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Spirit.” Now you ask whether the same Jew, who perseveres in the Christian
faith, must be rebaptized.
We respond
to your Fraternity, however, in this way: since there should be a distinction
between the one who baptizes and the one who is baptized, as is clearly discerned
from the words of the Lord, when he says to the apostles: “Baptize all nations in
the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” [Mt 28:19],
the Jews in question must be baptized again by another, in order to show that
one person is the one who is baptized, and another is the one who baptizes. . .
. If, however, such a person had died immediately, he would have entered into
his heavenly home without delay because of his faith in the sacrament, even if
not because of the sacrament of faith.
Heinrich Denzinger,
Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and
Morals, ed. Peter Hünermann, Robert Fastiggi, and Anne Englund Nash (43rd
ed; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), 261