Pastoral Letter Regarding Any Possible Invalid Baptisms

September 18, 2020

Last week, the bishop of another diocese informed me that one of his priests, while watching a video, discovered that he had been invalidly baptized as an infant by Deacon Philip Webb, a permanent deacon ordained for the Diocese of Dallas, but assigned at that time to Saint Catherine of Siena Catholic Church in Carrollton, Texas, in the Diocese of Fort Worth. Like the priest of the Archdiocese of Detroit who recently discovered that he, too, had been invalidly baptized, the man has subsequently been baptized, confirmed, given first Holy Communion, ordained a deacon, and ordained a priest. However, his invalid Baptism had horrible effects on the lives of those who thought that they were validly receiving sacraments administered by a man whom they thought to be a priest, and who thought himself to be a priest, but was in fact neither a priest nor even a Catholic.

There is positive and probable doubt that Deacon Webb validly baptized infants because it was his regular practice to use a substituted and invalid formula in the hundreds of baptisms he is believed to have administered...

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