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Dear catholic.com visitors: This Catholic Answers website, with all its free resources, is the world’s largest source of explanations for Catholic beliefs and practices. We receive no funding from the institutional Church and rely entirely on your generosity to sustain this website with trustworthy, accessible content. If every visitor this month donated $1, catholic.com would be fully funded for an entire year. If you’ve never made a gift, now is the time. Your donation will be matched dollar for dollar this week only. Thanks and God bless.
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Is Getting Baptized More Than Once a Sin against the Holy Spirit?

Question:

A friend of mine just got re-baptized. He was baptized as an infant and just got re-baptized by another church. I think that he may have sinned against the Holy Spirit.

Answer:

Objectively, yes, he did commit a sin against the Holy Spirit. By being re-baptized, he implied by his actions that what the Holy Spirit did in his first baptism was not sufficient. Objectively, that is a sin, because it insults the work of the Holy Spirit. But it is not the same thing as the sin against the Holy Spirit—the sin of “blasphemy against the Spirit“—which involves a final refusal to repent.

By trying to be baptized again, your friend was expressing a willingness to repent and be saved, so clearly no final impenitence was involved. Even though your friend’s action was objectively a sin, he may have committed it in innocent ignorance, in which case God won’t hold it against him. The sin of getting re-baptized unconditionally would be a grave one, which means that it would be a mortal sin if the usual conditions were met. But he may have been re-baptized with sufficient ignorance that the sin would not have been mortal. Either way, what he should do is go make a good confession (Jn 20:21-23), and, whether the sin was mortal or venial, he will be forgiven.

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