Secret Baptisms, "Toxic" Parents, and Prayer During the Single Years

Weekly Notes

It’s a Saturday in June and the world seems to be falling apart yet again. I’m working on a longer essay about this, but for now, I wanted to give you a quick reminder that I have a book that was literally written for times such as these. It’s called Letters to Myself from the End of the World, it came out in 2021, and it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever written. I would give it a way for free if I could, but I can’t. We are in town for the next week, though, so if you want to order it directly from me, I can at least send you a signed copy.

We weren’t planning on re-opening the bookshop until July, once we got back from vacation, but if you are trying to make sense of how to live in this broken universe, Letters to Myself from the End of the World is the best I’ve got to offer you, so we will make an exception this next week. (If you order after Tuesday, though, we probably won’t be able to get the books off until after we return from vacation).

And now for your questions

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Question Box

Can I or should I secretly baptize my niece? My brother and sister-in-law won’t baptize her and have left the Church.

First, I understand the temptation. It’s a normal one, and I know plenty of grandmas who have baptized their grandbabies in the bathtub. Baptism is a tremendous gift. It brings forgiveness from Original Sin and restores our capacity for Heaven, filling our souls with sanctifying grace, which is the very life of God. It also is part of the normal means of salvation (John 3:5). So yes, it’s a huge deal, and I totally get why it breaks your heart to see this gift withheld from your niece.

At the same time, as understandable as that temptation to baptize her yourself might be, the Church frowns upon clandestine infant baptisms that go against the parents’ desires for their child. Canon law actually forbids it, stating that no one—not even a priest—is permitted to baptize a child under the age of seven without the explicit permission of at least one parent (can. 868 §1). The only exception is imminent death.

In part, this is because the Church considers the parents, whether they are Catholic or not, the primary educators of their child. Baptism is their decision to make. It is their right.

More fundamentally, baptism is not magic. It’s a gift that comes with tremendous responsibilities. It grants a capacity to the soul that needs to be nurtured and directed in order to bear the fruit it’s meant to bear. Accordingly, when a child is baptized, the parents and godparents swear before God to raise the child in the Faith—to help her to know and love Jesus and His Church. It’s a solemn commitment and a serious obligation. To baptize a child with no reasonable hope of her being given the tools to grow in faith as she grows would wouldn’t be fair to her.

That being said, the Church does not require that one or both parents be believers in order for a child to be baptized. She simply requires at least one parent to give their consent to the baptism. If your brother and sister-in-law were to do that and entrust her formation in the faith to you or her grandparents or someone else close to the family, then the Church would fine with the child being baptized. In that case, though, there would no need for secrecy, so the baptism should take place in a church, with a priest or deacon.

Again, I understand why this teaching can be hard. But don’t forget that God loves your niece more than you do. He wants her to know Him more than you do. And He will move heaven and earth to bring that about. He is already doing the same for your brother and sister. Your decision to trust the Church in this way will hopefully be part of how He accomplishes that.

On a different not, for anyone who has questions about why Catholics practice infant baptism, I wrote about that here.

Could you address the growing issue of children cutting off contact with their parents, claiming they are “toxic.”

This is a tough one. It’s a real problem, but it’s also a problem that is so individual. I can only give a generic answer, not one that addresses the exact situation of every single person reading this newsletter.

That being said, last year, I wrote a little about what it means to honor our parents and how the Fourth Commandment doesn’t come with caveats. You can read that here. In it, I noted that God doesn’t tells us to honor our parents only when they’re good people who have parented us well. He simply commands us to honor them. There are no conditions put on the Fourth Commandment. None at all. Which means we are called to honor our parents not only in spite of their faults and failings, but also regardless of how much they see or take responsibility for their faults and failings. I know that sounds contrary to much of what we hear about relationships today, parental or otherwise, especially online. But it is what the Bible says. And that can be a hard pill to swallow.

It’s also a somewhat ambiguous pill. The Fourth Commandment doesn’t come with a ten point plan for what honoring our parents looks like. The Bible tells us that we must not mock our parents publicly, speak ill of them, or neglect them in their old age (Matthew 15:5, Sirach 3:5), but it doesn’t specify how often we’re supposed to talk with them or visit them, nor does it lay out what boundaries we can set with them when our relationship gets tough. God leaves it to us to think through those questions with charity, faith, and prudence.

It's probably fair to say, though, that charity, faith, and prudence will rarely lead a child to cut off all contact with their parents. Note: I said rarely. There will always be cases where the harm caused by some parents or the danger threatened by some parents is so grievous that their children need to walk away from the relationship. Doing so may be the best way, in those cases, for a child to honor their mother and father.

More often, though, honoring our mother and father looks like us recognizing that our parents are broken, imperfect people and choosing to love them in spite of those imperfections, while also striving to not imitate their imperfections ourselves.

This isn’t a simple thing, and how we go about loving and relating to our parents will look different depending on their struggles and ours. But I suspect one thing that might help is if people would stop using the word “toxic.” That word gets thrown around an awful lot these days, and while it’s just a word, words still matter. They give shape to how we see the world. And the rise of the word toxic in popular culture seems to go hand in hand with the trend of people cutting parents out of their lives.

This makes sense. Because a toxin is a poison. It’s something to be avoided or flushed out. And so, as soon as we label a person “toxic,” we’re labeling them as “poison.” We’re creating a habit of thinking about them that almost demands we cut them out of our lives. After all, what else do you do with toxins?

Fortunately, better words exist for struggling people and their bad behaviors—words that more accurately reflect the Catholic understanding of the human person and the restoration that God desires for our relationships. These are words such as “unhealthy,” “immature,” “wounded,” “dysfunctional,” and “sinful.” All those words capture the brokenness of the human condition, while still leaving room for redemption. The unhealthy can be made healthy. The immature can mature. The wounded can be healed. The dysfunctional can regain function. The sinful can repent. The toxic can only be avoided and and eliminated.

It’s also easier, when using those words, to own any possible part we might play in the struggle. Nobody wants to call themselves toxic. But acknowledging that we have been engaging in unhealthy or dysfunctional family dynamics right along with our parents (or siblings), feels a bit more doable.

Again, I know parents exist who are so unhealthy and so sinful that praying for them from afar is the only way to honor them. But in most cases, that kind of decision should be an absolute last resort. No one becomes a healthy, mature person by walking away from every challenging person in their life. Learning how to deal with difficult people is a necessary part of growth. We all need to learn how to treat people with kindness and respect, even when they don’t treat us with kindness and respect. We also need to learn how to engage with people in healthy ways, even when they’re not engaging with us in healthy ways. And we all need to learn to extend mercy to people, even when they’re not asking for mercy—to be gracious to people in the midst of their brokenness, just as we want people to be gracious to us in the midst of our brokenness.

Since time immemorial, family life is how people have been learning these lessons.

Our families are crucibles for holiness. Being a part of one is an opportunity to learn how to mature through difficulty, both difficult people and difficult situations. Unfortunately, we live in a unique time in human history, where it is unusually easy to opt out of that crucible. For most of human existence, people couldn’t just walk away from challenging family situations. Now we can. And while that has some pluses, it also comes with a whole host of minuses.

One last time, life is complicated. Every person reading this newsletter knows the particulars of their relationship with their parents. I do not. So, I can’t tell any one of you what to do. I don’t know what boundaries you need to set.

But I do know life goes by fast. I also know it breaks us, again and again and again. That breaking is hard, but it has the potential to remake each of us into a person who is more humble, compassionate, and understanding. As that happens, we start to see how broken other people are too, including our parents. We come to see them as people, with stories and struggles of their own, who, like us, did the best they could given those stories and struggles. But that seeing takes time. And if we cut our parents out of our lives when our sight is still immature, precious years are lost, precious years that we cannot get back, no matter what we do. I fear, in the years ahead, far too many grown children are going to find themselves mourning lost time with their parents only to discover there is no more time left to be had.

As someone who has watched one parent die and the other disappear into the fog of Alzheimers, I know this all too well. And I pray, pray, pray that my children are capable of a greater mercy towards Chris and me than I once was towards my own parents. I pray that for all of you, too.

I’m really struggling with being single right now. How should I pray during this time?

Oh gosh, it’s a tough season, isn’t it? You want to be happy for everyone, but as you watch everyone around you marry off and welcome children, it is just so hard not to struggle with loneliness, confusion, jealousy, and plain old sadness.

I get it. And I am sorry that you have to carry this cross right now. I had such a good single life, but being single for the entirety of my twenties and thirties, when I so badly wanted to be married and start a family, still wore on me hard.

It wasn’t all bad, though. Christ used those years to draw me to Himself, so even with all the hard, I’m grateful for that season. And one thing in particular for which I’m grateful is all the time I had for prayer. Which is why it’s so good that you are asking about prayer. You have time right now that you might never have again to develop a rich and beautiful prayer life. That will sustain you through whatever comes next.

As for how to do that, I’m not a spiritual director, just a woman who has been where you are. I can only answer you based on my own experience. Given that, though, I would say you should start by just being honest with Jesus. Share your hopes, frustrations, and desires with Him. If you’re angry with Him or confused by Him, share that, too. Don’t try to hide it. He knows anyhow, so there’s no point pretending otherwise.

At the same time, make sure you’re praying for His will to be done, not yours (because His is the better one), as well as asking Him to conform your will to His, not the other way around. A constant prayer of mine during those years was, “I want marriage, Lord. I want children. If this isn’t your will for me, change my heart, please. And if this is just a cross I have to bear, give me the strength and grace to carry it.”

That being said, petitionary prayers for your own desires and needs should not make up the bulk of your prayer life. Too much personal petitionary prayer can turn into unhealthy and obsessive naval-gazing. It also treats God like a genie, who only exists to grant your wishes. Over time, that kind of praying will increase your suffering, not alleviate it.

So, make sure that along with putting your needs before God, you’re also tapping into the Church’s rich tradition of prayer, in all its many forms. Every day, praise God for who He is. Thank Him for all the gifts He gives. Adore Him in the Eucharist. Meditate upon Him in the Scriptures and the mysteries of the Rosary. Pray the words of the Church’s Daily Office in the quiet of the morning or evening. Go to daily Mass as much as you can. And as you do all that, offer up prayers for others.

One particular form of intercessory prayer that I have found helpful is praying both for people who share my struggles and for people with the opposite struggle.

This meant when I was single I prayed for single women longing for marriage and for married couples struggling in their marriages. When I was dealing with infertility, I prayed for couples longing for children and for parents drowning in the chaos of small children or struggling under the weight of parenting older children. These days, I pray for overwhelmed moms of littles, working moms struggling to serve their families well, and families on tight budgets … and for single women, infertile women, families who need work, and people carrying the burden of wealth.

For a long time, praying for people who shared my struggles reminded me that I wasn’t alone, while praying for people who had the opposite struggle reminded me that life wasn’t perfect for those who had what I wanted (and that nothing other than God Himself can bring perfect happiness).

I still find this true, but as so many of my prayer requests have flip flopped over the past decade, those lessons have been underlined and highlighted. This way of praying has helped me see with even greater clarity that life in this world is never perfect. It always comes with struggles. We pray and pray and pray for something, only to get it and find ourselves with a whole new set of struggles. There is no one quick fix to sorrow in this life. There is just Jesus … and the hope of Heaven. If anything, I think this has made me more content with the good I do have. Not perfectly content. But more content. And that is a good thing.

I hope it does the same for you. Either way, please know I am praying for you.

Five Quick Things

1. I absolutely loved this article about the growing number of conversions to Catholicism that The Free Press ran last week: “How Catholicism Got Cool.” It was so gracious and respectful and just took the converts’ own reasons seriously, which is an exceedingly rare thing in the secular press. I obviously have some fundamental disagreements with Bari Weiss, the founder of

   The Free Press
   . But on the whole, I like what I see of her and admire her work just the same. I especially appreciate how she is wrestling with the question of God in a thoughtful, intelligent, and public way. I pray a lot for her and her partner, Nellie. You should too.

2. I have gotten several questions about the Washington State law which would require priests to violate the seal of the confessional in cases of child abuse or molestation. I didn’t answer them because last week’s podcast from

   The Pillar
   already has.

3. The countdown is on to (beauty)Counter’s return. Mark your calendars for June 25. I’ll have more to share with past clients later next week.

4. If you’re looking for a summer reading list that was not AI generated, check out this week’s episode of Visitation Sessions.

5. The house is finally heating up, and without any air conditioning it’s beginning to feel like an outpost on a swampy southern river delta. Naturally, this means I now want to play Gillian Welch on repeat all day long. If you’re looking for moody folk music that pairs well with sweltering temperatures, I recommend just about anything by her, but especially her 1996 album Revival, her 2011 album The Harrow and the Harvest, and her newest album Woodland.

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Come See Us This Summer

If you are anywhere near Dayton, a lovely group of people in Russia, Ohio are bringing Chris and me in to speak on the evening of July 19. The event starts at 6:30 p.m. and goes until 8:30 p.m. We will each give a talk, followed by a Q&A together. The event will take place at Russia Local School’s Varsity Gym (100 School Street, Russia, OH), and doors open at 6. If you have any questions, contact Kathryn Francis. Admission is free.

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In Case You Missed It

“Chasing Puppies Through Quicksand: On Motherhood In the Early Years”

“Rethinking the ‘F’ Word: On Feminism, the Manosphere, and Me”

“Money, Money, Money”