Issue 69 - The Pilgrim - March 2018 - The newspaper of the Archdiocese of Southwark

The Pilgrim March 2018
Baptism, gateway
to the sacraments
By Father Ashley Beck
In my column last month, I
stressed how important it is to be
aware of the physicality of the
sacraments, the fact that we use
material and physical acts and
elements for their celebrations.
These are not simply accidental
symbols – they are essential, and
if you don’t use them the
sacrament “doesn’t work”, it isn’t
valid.
We see this very clearly in the
first of the seven sacraments, holy
Baptism, seen as the “gateway”
to the other six as you can’t
receive a sacrament if you
haven’t been baptised first.
We see it as the way by which
we become members of the
Church. The earliest Christians
were baptised as adults when they
came to faith in Christ, and next
month I will be writing about
adult baptism in the Church today.
Now I want to turn to infant
baptism, still probably the means
by which most of you reading this
came into the Catholic Church, as
babies. The celebration of infant
baptism – often one of the
primary responsibilities of
permanent deacons – is also a big
part of the life of our parishes,
although the numbers of babies
being baptised, even in large
parishes, is smaller than in the
past.
We are told in accounts of the
early Church, including the Book
of Acts, that in addition to
individual adults whole households
and families (that is, including
children and servants) were
converted to Christianity and
were baptised.
Therefore, as Christianity grew
it became the normal practice for
infants to be baptised, especially
as the Church teaches that it is
necessary for salvation. So as time
went on babies were baptised
very soon after birth: until about
50 years ago parents would not
normally wait beyond three
weeks; nowadays is should be in
the first three or four months
after birth (as you will know if you
have not done this and have
trouble many years later getting
your child into a popular Catholic
school).
Increasingly the baptism of
infants became the norm: at the
Reformation some Protestant
reformers – the forbears of
Baptists and Pentecostalists today
– rejected infant baptism and
insisted on “believers’ baptism”,
and still do.
One of the things which is
different about infant baptism in
the churches which practice it is
that the purely social pressures on
families to have a baby “done”
are greatly reduced compared to
sixty years ago or longer – that’s
why the numbers are lower.
I think in Catholic parishes at
least most (but not all) families
who seek it because of some
genuine religious motivation or
attachment to Christianity, even if
they might seldom come to Mass.
At the same time, in our
parishes we want to do all we can
to enable people to understand
the importance of what they are
doing, and to enable them, if they
have “lapsed”, to engage more
visibly in the life of the Christian
community.
Therefore, in most parishes we
ask couples to come to one or
more preparation sessions. In
addition to explaining the
theology and practice of baptism
and going through what happens
in the service, those leading the
preparation sessions may also
enquire about other issues
relating to Christian discipleship
such as whether or not the
parents are married. If they are
not, we wouldn’t refuse baptism.
Most of you will be familiar with
what happens in the ceremony of
infant baptism, so I won’t go
through that now. I simply want to
focus on one thing which the
parents and godparents of the
baby are asked to do – what the
official order of service calls the
“renunciation of sin”.
The deacon or priest asks the
parents three questions: “Do you
reject sin, so as to live in the
freedom of God’s children?’, Do
you reject the glamour evil, and
refuse to be mastered by sin? and
Do you reject Satan, father of sin
and prince of darkness? (there is a
simpler form of words but I think
the longer form is the best).
These questions, which are
followed by a similar set of
questions about the basics of the
Christian faith, are personal to
the parents and godparents.
They are asking to have the
baby baptised, and it is their
commitment and willingness to
turn away from evil which is being
publicly demonstrated at this
point. These questions are also
important because they underline
Christian belief in the objective
presence of evil in the world,
made personal in the being we
call Satan.
There is a lot of evil in the
world: selfishness and greed in
our hearts, lack of love in our
hearts for God and our neighbor.
And there are sinful structures in
society which encourage people to
be greedy and selfish, or to glorify
war and militarism, attitudes
which show contempt for the
sanctity of life, and the ways in
which we are encouraged to use
other people as objects.
At a baby’s baptism we pray
that the child “is kept safe from
the poison of sin” (as the deacon
or priest says just before the
renunciation of sin) – this means
of all of these things which are
signs of evil and sin in the world.
At the baptism of their children
parents need to be enabled to
understand this, and to see that
to have your baby baptised, if you
understand it properly, is a
profoundly counter-cultural act.
Far from going along with social
convention, it sets you apart and
makes you different.
n Father Ashley Beck is assistant
priest of Beckenham, senior
lecturer in pastoral ministry at
St Mary’s University and dean of
studies of the diocesan
formation programme for the
diaconate
Viewpoint
Justice and peace at times
includes paracetamol
By Sister Janet Fearns
You pays your money and you takes
your choice, as the old saying goes
It’s no secret. You can pay as little
as 19p for a packet of eight tablets
of highly effective paracetamol or
you might consider nine versions of
Panadol (the same thing) and pay
between £1.75 and £4.49 in a wellknown
high street pharmacy. Go
online and you will quickly find a
huge range in prices – and postage –
for identical products.
A supermarket pharmacist showed
me two tubes of cream used to treat
insect bites and stings. “These are
the same medications”, she said as
she pointed to the bigger version,
“but this one is our own proprietary
brand, is much bigger and costs £3
less than the other product.
“The only difference is that the
supermarket describes it as ‘basic’.
The small tube is manufactured by a
company with a long-established
brand. The customer effectively
pays for the name because
otherwise the two products are
indistinguishable.”
She reminded me of an occasion
in the late 90s, when I stood in the
pharmacy of a remote mission
hospital in a developing country.
There were no painkillers stronger
than paracetamol then available in
the country to give a woman dying
of cervical cancer.
Shockingly, however, two shelves
still overflowed with
diethylstilbeostrol (DES), a drug
commonly prescribed when women
wanted to stop breastfeeding. It was
also prescribed for advanced
prostate cancer.
DES had a chequered history,
including its use in the chemical
castration of homosexuals. Produced
by more than 200 pharmaceutical
and chemical companies worldwide,
DES was subsequently found to
increase the risk of breast cancer
and rare cervical tumours in women
and girls.
Following lawsuits and extensive
investigations, several of the more
affluent and technologically
advanced countries banned the
manufacture and sale of DES. It was,
however, still freely and
inexpensively available in
impoverished and developing
countries, where local market
stallholders with no medical or
pharmaceutical training sold it to
anybody and everybody who could
pay for it.
But the problem does not stop
there. In 2016, the medical charity
Doctors without Borders (Médicins
sans Frontières) refused a donation
of one million PCV13 vaccines, an
immensely useful drug,
recommended for all children across
the world in an effort to combat
pneumonia.
The manufacturers were
genuinely shocked – but there was
another side to the story. The “free”
PCV13 vaccine is identical to
Prevnar 13, a drug sold by the same
company at £54 per dose to aid
organisations and, in the US, for
£128 per course of three to four
injections.
Because childhood pneumonia is a
potentially life-threatening illness,
the vaccine has been described as a
“blockbuster” contributor to
company profits.
The difference between PCV13
and Prevnar 13 is the same as that
between paracetamol and Panadol
or the two versions of the cream to
treat insect bites and stings: one
does not have a “name” and the
other does.
Similar circumstances also
surround vaccines to treat diarrhoea
and malaria, keeping prices (and
profits) high by preventing the
competition which might produce
cheaper versions.
When buying painkillers, do you
choose Panadol or paracetamol? MSF
was offered PCV13 for free because
fewer people buy medicines which
do not have a supportive brand
name. The famous name generates
consumer confidence and bigger
profits, mainly through successful
advertising.
Companies often say that they
supply developing countries at little
or next to nothing because of the
generous support of their more
affluent customers – remaining
silent about the cheaper, nonbranded
version which they actually
distribute. Income, not altruism,
drives the pharmaceutical market.
It costs millions to research,
develop and market effective drugs
against enormous competition.
Prohibitively expensive drug trials
may hold few guarantees of success.
In recouping their costs,
manufacturers often hold the
population to blackmail: a sick
person needs medicine.
What about countries where
people do not speak up, where
there is no organised support or
financial backing for complaints
when cost causes the stoppage of
one treatment or another? What will
make injustice and protectionism
disappear from the manufacture of
medicines?
When the founder of Facebook,
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife
Priscilla Chan, worth almost £41bn,
announced their decision to commit
most of their fortune to global
disease eradication, one
commentator remarked that this
was a waste of money: it should be
spent on the environment and
combating climate change.
Presumably she has not yet been
ill with an unaffordable cure within
reach. She has evidently not heard a
terminally ill woman’s agony when
she needed morphine and only had
paracetamol as a painkiller.
Justice and peace sometimes
includes something as simple as
paracetamol.
Page 9