Perhaps this rule will have in it the makings of a conversion of some to Episcopalianism.
How sinful does someone have to be before the church won’t baptize their kids, and why do they draw the line at that point? Surely, if they never baptized the offspring of sinners, no one would ever get baptized.
Post V2 isn’t that much further removed, either…
Not entirely, no.
You have no idea what you’re talking about, do you? :rolleyes:
If you want an official Baptism, you have to actually believe. Is that so hard to comprehend for you?
Seriously, you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, do you? You’re embarassing yourself now, not that you’d ever comprehend why. If you would like to be educated in the matters of which you run off your mouth, ask. Otherwise, hold your peice on things you do not understand.
According to my fundie protestant parents, the Catholics are all going to hell anyway, so really it’s no big deal if they won’t baptize your kid.
I was once trying to explain my parents’ religion to a lovely elderly Southern lady.
“Are they Baptist?” she asked.
“No, they believe that the Baptists are going to hell.”
She arched an eyebrow and remarked, “There’s going to be a lot of surprised Baptists.”
So now my picture of judgement day is a large throng of very stunned looking Baptists.
My parents’ church makes a big effort to wrangle in the children of hopeless sinners. The church actually has a bus to go pick up the kids on Sunday. Quite a few parents are willing to take advantage of this free baby-sitting and breakfast service. The church believes that if the children hear The Truth at an early age, they will choose to avoid the sins of the parents. The program does not appear to have met with much success.
Well, aren’t you just a fount of education?
How so? Because he asks some tough questions that expose the hypocrisy and judgementalism of the church that you can’t answer? It’s not a matter of comphrension. I think everyone else here understands just how absurd counting angels on a pinhead can be.
Google [England interdict] sunshine. The entire nation was (essentially- not exactly) excommunicated, and not just once. The most important time was under King John and is, imo, the reason England became one of the least religious nations in Europe. Basically the “protective veil” was pulled by the Papacy delivering the nation to the horrors of hell til such time as their king repented, and after perhaps some initial consternation the commoners and nobles alike noticed that England without the protection of the Church against the Forces of Evil looked pretty much like… England on an average Wednesday, didn’t it? (This is my theory, not canon, that I’d expound upon but it would take forever [my college paper on the subject went 50 pages] and be a hijack.)
I think laina makes a good point that shows my ultimate confusion over this. I grew up conservative Protestant where the churches feel that the children of the sinful need baptism and salvation infinitely more than the children of the really righteous. I’m certainly not saying that Protestantism is without its own brands of loopiness, but if you accept the reality of their matrix then in this it would seem they would have a good point.
Odd… I don’t feel embarassed. You seem to believe that a wafer becomes literal flesh, wine turns to the blood of a 2000 year old execution victim, believe that an institution whose teachings that have changed a gazillion times has nevertheless always been correct, that a priest- a MAN with pretty robes, but a MAN no less, can determine better than GOD whether somebody is in a state of Grace… what?
To believe this would embarass me.
We are all sinners. The point is that those who deliberately maintain a state of separation from the Church are ineligible for the Sacraments. It’s why I cannot receive Communion (or baptize any child I might have), and, while painful for me, I accept that, until such time as I change my ways, that is how it has to be.
While I don’t agree with **smiling bandit’s ** tone, Sampiro, your rebuttal is completely off-base, you know it, and it’s beneath a poster whose OP was well-stated and to-the-point.
No, we don’t. Transubstantiation is not transmutation.
No, we don’t. The Church has admitted mistakes and wrongdoing and will no doubt do so again.
Not better than GOD, better than regular people.
I understand that you are mystified by this, and, to be honest, the threat of withholding baptism is more than a little heavy-handed.
And you say you have no dog in the fight- maybe that is the point at which your confusion begins.
The crux is this:
A child cannot CHOOSE Christ, so his parents choose for him- Baptism involves them making promises on his behalf. A parent that is deliberately living outside the bounds of the Catholic Church cannot make such promises on behalf of his child.
Does it seem cruel? Perhaps. It is, however, perfectly logical.
It is almost completely analagous to the circumcision debate. Are you pro- or anti-circumcision for newborns? That, as well, is a parent making a decision for a child, and that decision, in your world, has much more “real” consequences than Baptism.
I am well aware of the historical fact. You do not seem to understand specifically and presently what it means or meant, and what it did, however. Suffice it to say ehre that “sending everyone in the country to hell” is not an accurate depiction of the theological principle.
I no longer have as much patience with jerks as I once did. **Sampiro ** wants to be a @$$hole, and I have no patience for his ilk. I’ve learned over the years that people like that can’t be reasoned with as long as they’re having apoplectic, so I’m not going to try. No one ever listens to me, anyway, so I say whatever I feel like.
Speaking of argumental cruxes…
In retrospect, I was disrespectful and do apologize for the tone above. I respect the rights of individuals to believe as they wish even if I do not respect the merits of the beliefs themselves or the Institutions that guard them.
From the Decree for the Armenians from the Council of Florence in 1439 under Pope Pope Eugenius IV (bull Exsultate Domine):
Eugenius IV was twice the pope that Eugenius III was.
But not half the man Pope Joan was.
smiling bandit, if the previous posters have it wrong, please educate us. Let us know what the facts are. I would like to eliminate my ignorance or my misinformation, but it’s not going to happen with your posts.
They’re making the same stuff up, then. During the course of my CCD classes, we actually had a special lesson on what to do if, say, your unbaptized friend got clipped by a snow plow (actual example for us to contemplate, it being winter in Maine and all, and some Nuns being extraordinarily morbid): Melt snow with breath in the palms (speeds things up in case your buddy expires before you get enough liquid water to perform the ritual…I guess ice crystals just won’t do), perform the appropriate blessing of the water, trace a crucifix on the forehead, and perform the appropriate batism ritual. I can’t remember the wording exactly, but I’m sure it can be looked-up.
Sister Agatha of the Gaping Stigmata or whatever her name was took pains to caution that we couldn’t go around baptizing people willy-nilly, and to save such activities for only the absolute direst need. In all but the most extreme circumstances, baptism is a sacrement reserved for the priestly order.
For some prespective, in the fifties, the nuns in Catholic school used to beat my father silly (and I mean wail on him Joe DiMaggio-style with a yardstick) for being left handed (and for knowing some pretty filthy French profianities). Yep. My Dad. Beaten black-and-blue by nuns. For lefthandedness. There were certainly some days when I would have paid to see that, but most of the time I did feel quite sorry for him to have to put up with such barbarism; and I guess it got so bad with one particular nun that my grandmother put her foot down and transferred him (at considerable expense) to the…sit down for this one…Episcopal school. If you knew my grandmother, you’d know what an extreme solution that really was.
At any rate, my Dad had been told so many times that he was going to roast in the fieriest pit of Gehenna so many times he was more-or-less resigned to it by age 11, at which point he turned into a complete hellion and had infinitely more fun than before his conversion to the Church of the Apathetically Damned. When I got older and my uncles started to reveal what a complete and joyful miscreant my father had grown into before he got drafted and received yet another course of authoritarian pumelling, I almost wept tears of pride.
So, according to Catholic beliefs:
(1) What happens to a 5 year old child who is raised, unbaptized, with loving gay parents, who attempt to teach him Catholic beliefs as best they can, and then dies?
(2) What happens to precisely the same 5 year old child raised by the same gay parents who dies at the age of 5, but was baptized?
Unless there’s a difference between those two, then the OP doesn’t hold water.
Not that I have any particular respect for the Catholic Church, particularly vis a vis their stance on homosexuality.