Yes, but shampoo the carpet immediately afterward.
I mentioned this in the pit thread as well, and wonder if this is the doctrinal issue at stake:
Apparently, as part of their vows and duties and whatever they promise when they become a priest is the agreement to be the personal (and individual) intermediary between lay people and God. It is supposed to be a very personal responsibility of the individual priest. A monk may be holy but he is only responsible for his own soul. The priest is, in a sense, responsible for the well-being of other peoples’ souls.
I read this in a Brother Cadfael novel, so it must be true.
God doesn’t want to send all those unbaptized babies to hell, but in his official capacity he finds it necessary to do things that he personally finds reprehensible. He does feel bad about it though, so there’s that.
My impression from briefly skimming the responsa is that the priest, at that moment, is considered to be a stand-in for Jesus. So if I’m understanding this correctly, which I may very well not be, the priest has to SAY “I”, but he’s not actually referring to himself by that pronoun, but to Jesus.
I’m a little fuzzy on the details from my upbringing, but I think they may for a split second also be made of bread.
Then surely the the inscrutable mystery of the Holy Trinity implies that singular or plural pronouns are equally applicable.
Well, the Church does believe that God may sometimes choose to be more merciful than the letter of the law would dictate, so those parents can take comfort in the thought that MAYBE their babies didn’t go to hell. You certainly wouldn’t want to take any chances, though.
This. As if the whole idea wasn’t ridiculous enough to begin with, the Catholic Church has just increased the absurdity by an order of magnitude.
Can’t this all be fixed with a Papal Bull? Or maybe the Diocese could set up a website to certify one’s baptism. For a small fee, they could declare your baptism legit. It would be a Paypal Bull.
Thread 
Makes me wonder exactly what Pope John XXIII meant by this quote.
See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.
I think the current church may have mixed up what goes in what category.
The link says that even a non-Christian can perform a baptism when the person’s life is in danger, as long as they do so with the proper intent. I’m not sure how much danger is sufficient. Canon 861 says this:
§2 If the ordinary minister is absent or impeded, a catechist or some other person deputed to this office by the local Ordinary, may lawfully confer baptism; indeed, in a case of necessity, any person who has the requisite intention may do so. Pastors of souls, especially parish priests, are to be diligent in ensuring that Christ’s faithful are taught the correct way to baptise.
So it’s really just “necessity.” And they don’t use any intensifiers like “urgent” or “grave,” so it sounds to me like this is just a middle-of-the-road need, not necessarily being on your deathbed.
How odd. And, the I/we guy certainly had the right intent, but in his case, that wasn’t sufficient.
Yes, exactly. Just how many, “Blessed are the cheesemakers…” things are out there anyway?
I think the issue is actually that he didn’t have the right intent. He was deliberately changing the pronoun to make some theological point that the church disagrees with. If he’d screwed it up because he was just bad at Latin, I don’t think there would be a problem.
Like, if he’d stated before each baptism that when he said, “Holy Ghost,” he specifically meant “Casper the Friendly Ghost,” then performed the actual ritual flawlessly, the church would probably still have been, “No, those don’t count.”
Can’t they just transfer the priest to another part of the country, not tell the new parish anything about it and then cover up everything?
Seems like there is precedent.
No, the issue isn’t intent, it’s that, although they’re very liberal about who can perform the rite in a pinch, they insist on this very specific wording. I think Miller is right that they might not have made such a big deal about it if some people weren’t doing this to make a point. Oddly, though, everyone seems to agree that this particular priest wasn’t trying to make any point, he just…somehow got through priest school without realizing he was doing it wrong? It appears English isn’t his native language, but still.
Oh, they don’t let you off that easy in cases of serious wrongdoing like this.
Regardless of the intent of the priest, the Church now says the baptisms were invalid. OK, stipulated. A ghastly error, right? Thousands of unbaptized people walking around, just waiting to meet their deaths and miss out on Heaven, I guess, through no fault of their own. So here’s my question:
Was there never, in all these years, a bishop, or another priest, or even a knowledgeable layperson present at any of these baptisms, who might have drawn attention to the error before thousands more were racked up? Seriously. The Church evidently believes people’s souls are actually in peril now – not a minor error at all – but for decades, nobody noticed?
More like: nobody bothered to notice. The Church is claiming it’s really important NOW, but that’s given the lie by the fact that it obviously hadn’t been particularly important BEFORE now. Anyone could have noticed this and fixed it years ago, if it actually mattered. It’s not solely the fault of one priest. Any bishop or priest who witnessed any of these invalid baptisms should immediately resign as well.
Is that what the church actually believes in this case, though? I think the important part of wanting people to be rebaptized is probably more about enforcing theological orthodoxy. The point isn’t, “We have to do this, or people will go to hell,” it’s “We have to do this, or people will think this was an acceptable way to perform a baptism.”