Note: On Tuesdays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
It happens almost every time I’m talking with a group of Catholic women of a certain age whom I haven’t met 
before. One of them finds a private moment and she tells me that she’s baptized one of her grandchildren. Her adult children don’t have any sort of a spiritual practice, and she is grieved by that and wonders what she did wrong. She prays for their conversion. But it’s the grandchildren who worry her. At least her children got their sacraments. Her grandchildren are getting… nothing, she thinks. And so she baptized them, because what would happen if an accident befell them and they died tomorrow? What about their salvation?
In these situations, I mainly listen. Generally, I counsel advising the children that she’s done this, but I don’t get into the fine points of whether she should have or could have. That’s a conversation for her to have with a priest. I do remind her that maintaining a relationship with her children will give her so many, many opportunities for evangelization to them and the grandkids. For is there any more powerful tool in bringing souls to the Lord than living our daily lives in service to and love for Him and His people?
In Matthew 18:12-14, Jesus reminds us that the Father searches high and low for the sheep who have gone astray. Not one of them has to be lost. Let’s do our best to point them back to Him by our every word and action.
