Of course you can’t baptize with Gatorade. Everybody knows this. When a blogger got the Catholic Answers AI apologetics app to say you could, in an emergency situation, it was justly mocked all over the Catholic internet. When CNN and countless news sites ran stories about that app, they led with the same lurid, ludicrous Gatorade angle.
Whatever else we might say about Catholicism, there’s one thing on which everyone can agree: Gatorade isn’t valid matter for baptism.
Except . . . wait a second . . . maybe it is?
Sacramental theologians classify types of sacramental matter in three categories: certainly valid, doubtful, and certainly invalid. These classifications find their way into sacramental manuals that become normative guides for practical reference in seminaries, parishes, dioceses, and so on. This is necessary because, even though the basic prescribed matter for the sacraments is pretty straightforward—things like bread, water, wine, oil—in each case, there are many possible small variants. Each needs to be examined and held up to Catholic standards for liceity (adherence to Church requirements for legally proper celebration of a sacrament) and validity (suitability for effecting the sacrament).
Water is the matter (specifically, what’s called the proximate matter) for the sacrament of baptism. For the licit (lawful) celebration of the sacrament in an ordinary circumstance, it must be pure, clean, blessed, fresh water. But the category of valid matter for baptism is larger. The Catholic Encyclopedia, drawing on the sacramental tradition, notes that valid matter includes liquids like sea water, bog or marsh water, dew, melted ice, and condensation. The water can be “fresh or salty; hot or cold; colored or uncolored.” It doesn’t have to be blessed to be valid matter.
In The Administration of the Sacraments, a well-regarded 1963 manual by Dominican Nicholas Halligan, we find still more specificity. Water that seeps from walls is valid, as is “water mixed with a small amount of an extraneous element.” Certainly invalid, on the other hand, are substances like blood, oil, urine, gravy, shoe polish (!), and “all things not in a liquid state.”
Then we have the doubtful category. These are liquids that are water-like but about which validity can’t be determined for certain or fully agreed upon. Doubtful substances may be deemed more or less probable in their validity, and different people may rank their probability differently. The Church hasn’t ruled definitively on them, and theologians are still hashing out the arguments. Halligan lists in this category such liquids as light broths and tea, water extracted from vines or flowers, and even “thin ink.”
So where does Gatorade fit in?
Well, let’s use “Gatorade” as a stand-in for a category of modern non-alcoholic beverages that are mostly water, including thirst-quenching sports drinks, sodas, and the kind of flavored sparkling waters that line the aisles of your local Costco. What are they? That is, what are they made of, on a molecular level?
Sports drinks come in many varieties, ranging from roughly 90 percent water (with the rest consisting of sugars, salt and other minerals, and coloring) to 99 percent water in the clear, sugar-free versions. The range is similar for colas and other soft drinks: some are packed with significant amounts of sugar by weight, whereas others, like Diet Coke, are 99 percent water. Then come drinks like La Croix and San Pellegrino Essenza, marketed under names that may or may not include “water” and composed of 99+ percent water with trace amounts of flavoring and no caloric matter. (In contrast, common fruit juices, which are invalid matter, range from 50 to 85 percent water.)
How do those numbers compare to substances in the “valid” category? Well, without a spectrometer handy to analyze various kinds of bog, swamp, and cave-wall water, it’s hard to say, but we do know that sea water is about 96.5 percent true water. The rest is salt, minerals, and traces of decaying seaweed, whale poop, microplastics, and everything else floating around the teeming brine.
That number seems like a good baseline for what qualifies as valid baptismal matter, at least with regard to water purity. And, judging by that criterion, the sugar-free sports drinks, diet colas, and flavored waters seem to compare well. After all, those drinks are really just “flavored waters” or “slightly impure waters” to one degree or another. That they may be colored, unlike pure water, does not invalidate them as baptismal matter. And some of these sports and soft drinks are actually more water-y, in their composition, than sea water.
But wait: as many will point out, the spectrometer is not the final judge of whether a substance is suitable for baptism. It also has to be something that, as the Encyclopedia puts it, “men will ordinarily declare water.” That’s because the sacrament is a sign, not the product of a recipe. Applying this commonsense test, they will say that these beverages in question aren’t valid matter because we don’t call them “water,” and so they can’t signify what water signifies—cleansing—in baptism.
Although this strikes me as teetering on the brink of nominalism—things are what they are, not what we call them—the point about sign-value is important. Yes, Diet Coke is 99 percent water, and sea water is only 96.5 percent. Yes, Diet Coke, like true water, will hydrate you if you drink it, whereas sea water can kill you if you drink it. And yes, Diet Coke can actually be a pretty good cleansing agent (arguably more so than baptism-valid muddy water or bog water). But, Diet Coke is called “Diet Coke,” and sea water is called “water,” and if it’s the sign of water you’re after, that matters.
If, however, an argumentative person wanted to press the Gatorade case, he might point out that many of these sports drinks, soft drinks, and hybrid flavored waters have simply been given their names by the machine of modern marketing. Is Madison Avenue’s word dispositive in the world of Catholic sacraments?
What would a medieval peasant think of Gatorade? Very possibly he would call it slightly sweet, slightly salty water. The bubbles of Diet Coke would tickle his tongue, and he would have nothing in his experience to compare with its artificial sweetener, but I bet he would describe that liquid phenomenon as something in the neighborhood of water. (He certainly would not call it wine or a spirit, or oil, or blood, or poison.) It took modern focus groups and clever ad men to give new, catchy names to what our forebears would recognize as tricked-up water variants.
And where would we be if they hadn’t? What if the scientists at the University of Florida in the 1960s had called their new hydrating drink “sports water” instead of “Gatorade”? Would it have been valid matter in that case?
Perhaps not all the variants of Gatorade we have today. Just as the alcohol content in wine can affect its validity as matter for confecting the Precious Blood, so too, perhaps, may excessive sugar or mineral content—say, pushing a liquid below sea water’s 96.5 percent purity threshold—take a soft drink out of the valid category for baptism, no matter what we call it. But the no-calorie thirst-quenchers and lightly flavored sugarless sparkling drinks? At the very least, we ought to recognize the case they make for being valid matter. They are almost entirely water, they can do everything water does, and the names by which we call them could be considered mere accidents of corporate branding rather than indicative of their ontology.
Without further magisterial guidance, though, we can’t say that these drinks belong in the certainly valid class, though possibly those beverages with “water” in their name already would have a strong-enough case. And of course they’re unquestionably illicit. So don’t baptize with them!
Unless . . .
Here we arrive at that middle category: liquids of “doubtful”—that is, uncertain—validity. These are liquids that, according to Halligan, “do not certainly imply natural water” or whose “mixture with other elements almost supplants the water.” We noted some examples above, and if our sports drinks and other beverages under discussion do not reach the level of valid, they would certainly wind up here—and likely at a higher level of probability than some other doubtful liquids, such as soup and ink.
This category is important for more than just wonkish theology debates, because doubtful liquids, in Halligan’s words, “can and must” be used to baptize in a case of necessity (danger of death) when there is no certainly valid water available (emphasis added). Even those liquids, he adds, “with the least probability” of validity can and must be used. This reflects the consensus tradition and practice of the Church when dealing with doubtful matter. (Baptism may never be attempted with invalid matter.)
Imagine you are hiking in the desert with your unbaptized friend. You wander from the trail and get lost, and then he suffers a bad fall. He can’t walk, he may have internal injuries, you have no cell service, and it is very possible that he will die before you both can be rescued. Frightened, but possessing a sound mind, he makes a statement of faith and asks you to baptize him. You can’t find any stream, pond, or even puddle nearby, but you have a few bottles of a certain orange sports drink.
There is no debate about what you can and must do: take the Gatorade and baptize him. Halligan advises adding a few words noting the doubtful nature of the matter (e.g., “If this be valid matter, I baptize you . . .”). Then, if he makes it back to safety and recovers, he must be baptized again in a licit rite, likewise with added conditional language acknowledging that the first baptism might have been valid.
And if he doesn’t make it back? Well, doubtful means not certain. But you will have done your full duty as a Christian, within the bounds of what is reasonable and permitted by the Church. And you will have good reason to hope that he was reborn as a child of God and set on the path to his eternal reward.