Its also possible it wasn’t a Papist/Roman Catholic Church. Catholic can mean anything from Eastern Orthodox to Roman Rite to Evangelical Catholic (basically old school Lutheran) and all have different rules. The branch of Orthodoxy I was raised in would allow a godparent of another religion but that person had to swear and attest to seeing the child raised within our sect/denomination should the parents be unable.
It was a Roman Catholic church.
I was raised Catholic but it’s no secret that I no longer consider myself to be Catholic. Even if I did consider myself to be Catholic the church wouldn’t consider me to be in good standing because of some reasons.
I was supposed to be godmother to my older niece but the man they choose to be her godfather isn’t Catholic so my cousin is her godmother.
I am godmother to my younger niece and a cousin as both of their godfathers are Catholic.
In this family all that means is you buy them a gift on birthdays and Christmas until they are 18.
That’s what it seems to mean in many families, and not even that for many more. In the case I have related the mother of the girl had a reason to be concerned for her own well being and wanted to make sure someone would take responsibility for the welfare of her daughter. I know nothing about the official rules of the church, so I can’t make any claims about the validity of the process in this case, I’m merely relating what I experienced.
Same here. I talked to my very Catholic sister-in-law about it:
ME: “Y’know, I don’t really believe in God, are you sure you want me to be a godparent?”
SIL: “If something happens to us, will you make sure she learns about Jesus?”
ME: “Yes, I can do that.”
SIL: “Then yes, we want you to be her godfather.”
And that was that. Despite my non-beliefs, I felt honored to be chosen.
I don’t recall that part at all. Maybe different churches do it differently. IMO, it should be the parents’ decision and nobody else’s.
My surmise is that this goes to how the liturgy is experienced. For TriPolar, what I suppose he means by noting that he was never asked is that he was never asked before the Mass. That is, he did not experience the scripted questions and responses as genuinely real interrogatories. There is, perhaps, some merit to this line of thinking. (Advantage Protestantism …)
HMC teaches, however, that these are, in fact, real-deal questions. Were I the chief liturgist, I might keep the celebrant’s text the same, but instead of including a scripted response for the parents & godparents, I would include a rubric “The parents and godparents answer the questions posed to them.” Laypeople, however, are very uncomfortable ad-libbing it at the altar/sanctuary, particularly in churches that are otherwise liturgical.
Those questions may have been asked as part of the ceremony. I certainly didn’t respond to them, but my wife and I weren’t up on the stage with the Priest and the parents, so I never perceived it as being asked directly. I’ve been to other Catholic services, I never respond with the others. I’ll stand out of respect for the others in attendance, but I don’t kneel. I don’t know what to make out of all of this. Would the Priest have stopped the ceremony if he thought I wasn’t participating according to the rules and regulations?
I always understood godparent to mean taking care of the religious education of the child in the event the parents aren’t doing it. I always got the impression though, that if my parents had died when I was a child my godparents were supposed to take care of me. I don’t know how that would have worked and unless my parents had put it in their will I’m sure the state would have decided where to put me.
I was closer to the aunt and uncle who were my godparents, and I am closer to the cousin who is my goddaughter. I’m equally close to my nieces but there are only two of them so being a godmother to one didn’t make any difference. If I had 20 nieces and nephews it probably would make a difference.
It seems like a way of creating a special relationship,
The, ahem, sanctuary.
Baptisms ordinarily take place at the font, which are usually located at the entrance to the nave from the narthex. That is, on the opposite end of the main aisle from the altar.
If you were neither at the font or the sanctuary at any particularly climatic moment of the liturgy, you are not actually the godparents and were just invited to the christening. Hopefully you got some cake out of the deal.
The Godparents must be “on the stage” (sic). Was there someone else there with them? In that case, the someone else is the “liturgical” godparent; you’re the godparent in the “we want you to help us raise this child” sense, but not in the eyes of the RCC.
First, I apologize for the incorrect terms here. I do not mean to disrespect the beliefs of others.
I recall only the Priest and parents on the sanctuary. I have seen a font before as described, but don’t recall it being used as part of the service. Sorry, I have no other information to offer.
Depends on the priest. I’ve been at Masses where the priest stopped in mid-sacrament to yell at some people in the back to take their crying kid out of the church.
All of the ‘No, I’m a god-parent in the Catholic church, but the baby wasn’t baptised at the font, the priest asked me no questions, and I was never agreeing to do what is pledged by every other god-parent [excepting the other poster who claims an aberrant ceremony] , it meant nothing to me.’ has the ring of faulty memory to me.
Sure I guess it’s possible that a priest just sort of pretended to baptise a child, but it seems unlikely. It also seems weird that parents would undergo this sort of ritual and choose for god-father someone to whom it meant nothing, who didn’t even pay attention, whio really should have stood up and said “oh no, I don’t agree to any of that.”
Just on my own experience, I’m pretty sure if I had not foresworn Satan and all his works and affirmed a belief in Jesus Christ and the holy Catholic Church (I was much younger then) the priest would have thrown me out of the church. He would not have just let it slip by that I did not respond or responded in the negative as to holding a belief in God and the tenets of the church.
I believe I was quite clear that my memory was faulty on several details because that service was of no consequence to me. Those things I stated as happening did happen. Those things that I said I could not recall, I could not recall. I have no idea if I was officially made a godfather according to the church. I have related my experience.
I am the godfather to my three nieces. My sister and I were both raised Catholic and confirmed but neither of are “in good standing” now or attend Mass. She is divorced, didn’t get an annulment, and wasn’t married to the father of the kids in a Catholic church. The kids were baptized mostly for the sake of my very religious mother. The priest knew all this and did it anyway.
I was told that I couldn’t be my nieces’ godmother not because I am a Lutheran but because I’m an unmarried female Lutheran. This may or may not have been fabricated by my SIL as a nice way to say “Sorry I’d rather have my Catholic sisters do it.”
I think it very much depends on time and place. I was godfather to my nephew, although not a Catholic (nor a Christian of any kind). There was also a godmother though, who was a member of a parish, so apparently the “one verified Catholic godparent” rule applied.
It is useful to reflect on the sacrament and ceremony of a baptism.
Sacramentally, it represents dying to sin and rebirth into the family of Christians. Thus, baptisms are a communal event. The “old” model of private christenings with just friends and family is now disfavored. (The word “old” is in quotes because it is old in the sense that it was the norm for a small handful of generations past; in early Christianity, baptism was a communal event. Thus this is a recovery of ancient practices. Incidentally, this is why full-immersion baptism is favored (albeit perhaps only intellectually) by liturgical thinkers. Full immersion is the most authentic form of baptism; affusion and aspersion, however, remain sacramentally effective.)
In any event, baptism: a communal event. And the community at issue is (1) Christianity worldwide, which is reflected (2) by the parish. Significantly, baptism is not a “family-only” event. One’s friends and family are a group less extensive than the community into which one is being baptized.
This being so, the ideal candidate for a baptismal sponsor is a non-relative active member of the baptizing parish. This naturally presupposes that such a person will be of the same faith, and even denomination, into which the baptizand is being admitted.
A counterveiling consideration is that godparents/sponsors of young children affirm the baptsimal covenant on behalf of baptizands unable to do so. For this assertion to be meaningful, the person doing it should be expected to have some role in the child’s upbringing. (Of course, this could easily be someone in the parish, and it is problematic if the parents never darken the parish doorstep again following their child’s baptism.)
The baptismal covenant does require assent to Jesus Christ as savior, so it would be inappropriate for someone who does not believe this to serve as a godparent.
So for adult baptizands, the sponsor typically comes from the parish. For young children, this probably should also be the case, but this misbegotten notion that this is a “family” event persists (it is a “parish family” event). Priests don’t like to say no or to make a baptism an occasion for strife, but on the other hand, one ought to be able to explain the meaning of the sacrament of baptism and why that requires certain considerations in selecting a godparent/sponsor.
I remember that we (the parents, with the godparents to be) were asked the standard questions as part of the ceremony. However there was no attempt made prior to the baptism to confirm that the future godparents were Catholic. This was in some contrast to our wedding where my wife had to contact her aunts in Peru to have them go up to some remote mountain chapel in the Andes that was open five months out of the year to get a copy of her baptismal certificate to send back up to Chicago before she could get married in the church.
On the other hand, since we were married in the same church and had the same priest performing the baptism, it’s just as likely that he trusted us to be playing by the rules.
“I believe I was quite clear that my memory was faulty on several details because that service was of no consequence to me”
Then we are in areeement - as I said the tale has the ring of faulty memory.
I will note that it seems a shame for the little girl that care of her eternal soul meant so little to her sponsor.