FINDING OUT MORE
BAPTISM AS RESURRECTION

     The catacombs also bring us the thinking of early Christians about Baptism. We administer Baptism to our infants by pouring a little water on their heads. It was not so for early Christians. Their ritual was much more expressive and showed the fullness of Pauline theology. In the catacombs, the person being baptised is always shown naked, since he or she must be immersed in the water. In fact, they must put off the old person and put on the new.


      These ancients understood this well: the baptisteries themselves were constructed outside the church to express this concept. They were buildings which had the form of tombs, eight-sided or six-sided, as was usual for a mausoleum. When, on the night of Holy Saturday, Christians saw the baptised entering the baptistery with their clothes, they thought of this. The catechumens were about to die: thus they entered to die, to put off the old life, to die and then to rise again. In the morning they came out from there, dressed in white, the sign of the new life. This was a way of thinking which must have meant a lot to early Christians, even in Trastevere.

(Umberto Fasola)


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