A woman I know, a member of the Southern Baptist Church, died recently. A member of her family refers to himself as a “Catholic minister.” She was kept unaware that he had become a Catholic because it would have been upsetting to her and she was elderly.
He was not with her when she died, but was at least ten or fifteen minutes away. At her funeral he told a member of the family that acting in his official capacity, he had baptized her as a Roman Catholic after her death.
Is this in keeping with traditional Roman Catholic practice? I have known that there are non-priests that perform baptisms of infants. But is this unrequested and undesired (by the rest of the Protestant family)“act” even a normal Catholic practice?
(I have nothing against Roman Catholic teachings myself and attended the Cathedral when I was in college. But to me this was almost an abuse of a corpse. The woman was a devout Protestant.)