Off by a single word
The wrong word was used in a magic ceremony so the magic ceremony is invalid. You might think this is a small matter that can easily be rectified by re-doing the ceremony using the correct word this time – but unfortunately, perhaps tragically, it wasn’t just the one, it was many. Many many many. And not valid means…eternal torture*. Oops.
A Catholic priest in Arizona has resigned after he was found to have performed baptisms incorrectly throughout his career, rendering the rite invalid for thousands of people.
Thousands of people doomed to eternal torture*! You’d think it would be dominating the news cycle.
The Catholic Diocese of Phoenix announced on its website that it determined after careful study that the Rev. Andres Arango had used the wrong wording in baptisms performed up until June 17, 2021. He had been off by a single word.
During baptisms in both English and Spanish, Arango used the phrase “we baptize you in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” He should have said “I baptize,” the diocese explained.
Ok, but it’s a fine point, and in a way “we” is sweeter, it suggests embrace by everyone, so can’t they just
STOP RIGHT THERE.
Of course they can’t.
They can molest children for years on end, they can protect the molesters for years on end, but they can’t turn a blind eye to a “we” that must be an “I.”
“It is not the community that baptizes a person and incorporates them into the Church of Christ; rather, it is Christ, and Christ alone, who presides at all sacraments; therefore, it is Christ who baptizes,” it said. “If you were baptized using the wrong words, that means your baptism is invalid, and you are not baptized.”
Sorrrrreeeeeeeeeeee – you’ve been running around unbaptized all this time. Our bad.
The diocese said that while the situation may seem legalistic, the words, materials and actions are crucial aspects of every sacrament — and changing any of them makes them invalid.
“For example, if a priest uses milk instead of wine during the Consecration of the Eucharist, the sacrament is not valid,” it said. “The milk would not become the Blood of Jesus Christ.”
Yeah it doesn’t do that whether it’s milk, wine, or horse piss.
Updating to add: It doesn’t lead straight to hell, so I asterisked those bits.
God the Omni-benevolent will send them to hell upon death, for an eternal punishment, for an innocent mistake made by someone else and without their knowledge. Explain to me again how this guy is held up as just and merciful…?
See how powerful pronouns are? CHECKMATE, TERFS.
Now I’m itching to see someone using horse piss for the Eucharist.
I expected the problem to be invoking not The Father and The Son but maybe the non binary holynesses
It’s leviOHsa! Not levioSAH!
I suspect the issue is that the ‘we’ wording makes the priest merely a member of the community, rather than the one with all the special perqs. This is the one thing the RCC can NEVER permit, as the exalted-ness of the clergy is the key method of retaining authority over their parishioners, and thus it’s a much bigger deal than creating hellfire-anxiety in a few thousand of their flock.
I read through the FAQ; amusingly, it doesn’t mention, “What happens to someone who has already died, if they were improperly baptized by Rev. Arango?” That’s the question that would throw the whole issue of just how monstrous the God they choose to worship must be, after all–or, if the answer goes the other way, how facile all of this jibber-jabber is.
Puzzling. When I was a wee one in Roman Catholic grade school I recall being taught that there were all sorts of spirit-of-the-thing escape clauses to the rituals.
In the example of using milk in lieu of sacramental wine, the milk should become the blood of Christ, as long as sacramental wine was unavailable. A perfectly legal Eucharist should be possible with corn tortillas and Dr. Pepper, as long as that was the closest approximation to the required ingredients.
Regarding baptism, there were several special-circumstances varieties including a ‘baptism of desire’, such that if a person dying unbaptized and with no priest available sincerely wishes they had gotten baptized when they had the chance then they are as good as baptized. Of course, if they recover then they should promptly make arrangements for the usual ceremony or else they will be judged insincere and revert to unbaptized.
With that kind of leniency I am surprised that ‘we’ vs ‘I’ was not judged as a valid case of ‘baptism by close enough’. Or perhaps the affected individuals need to make immediate arrangements for a proper baptism but would be as good as baptized if hit by a truck en route to the font?
I’VE GOT IT. THE WAY OUT OF THIS MESS.!!
“And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Matt 16:19
That was the open cheque given by Christ to St Peter, the first pope, and naturally passed along to all subsequent popes. It had to be split for a while between the two rival popes in the Avignon period, but God obviously was none too fussed about that, otherwise he would have smartly removed one of them, probably using a lightning bolt of his own manufacture and brand (not to be confused with inferior substitutes.)
An email along those lines to the present Pope, followed by a quick papal prayer, no need for it to be public at all, should be all that is required.
In the mean time, the Rev. Andres Arango need only get down on his knees, preferably in private, and just say ‘sorry God, but I made a right ballsup of that one.’ God will understand, and absolution will be instantaneous. But best it be kept out of the public eye, lest one or mre of his simple and innocently faithful parisioners be confused, lose their faith, and finish up in the Devil’s Hell fire.
Well Omar, that seems as entirely reasonable as any of the other magical thinking we’re exposed to these days, so I don’t see why not. In fact, it’s backed up with better reasoning than most.
you’re saying it wrong! It’s “!LeviOsa”, not “LeviosAR”!
Don’t forget that in Godspeak words like “just” and “merciful”, or for that matter “good”, “benevolent”, “loving” etc., are just synonyms for “whatever God happens to be/do/want”*. E.g. if what God wants happens to want is torture every living being for eternity, then that is what the word “good” means in this particular context. To ask whether or not God is “good” is hardly even a meaningful question (“is God whatever God happens to be?”). The answer is yes by definition.
…except when it’s not. For the specific purpose of arguing that God’s existence is desirable (therefore God exists!), it might be necessary to take as a premise that God is the sole source/guarantee of human values, deserves all the credit for the good deeds of other people, and without him there is no reason to hold any of those values (or for that matter not rape and kill with a vengeance) in the first place. But if someone points out that the Biblical God is the most perfect antithesis imaginable of those very same human values, then God’s moral is not human moral and who are you to demand that your petty human values should have any bearing on God?!
*The same way “worker’s empowerment” in some places is just another name for “whatever the party/chairman does”, or “women’s rights” is just another name for “whatever trans-identified males want”.
I’m sure the Church just loves holding this priest’s wording slip-up as an example. The bigger a deal they make out of the tiniest of wording slip-ups, the more solemnveryserious, magicalmystical the whole silly nonsense is made out to be. Which of course is exactly like the Church of Trans and their endless drama around the most humdrum and utilitarian class of words, pronouns.
It’s risky though. Maybe some people will be impressed by the solemnveryserious magicalmystical very spooky nonsense, but others will be disgusted by the petty tyranny and then start to wonder how the church thinks it knows all this.
What happens if all the right ingredients are present, the correct words spoken, but your priest is broken? What if you’ve got one of those priests who likes fucking children? Does the magic still work? Do the ingredients still transform, does Jesus show up even when the ritual is performed by someone who is morally bankrupt?
Never mind how the skill to do this magic is “learned” in the first place; how does anyone extract or remove this knowledge or skill so that you don’t have demoted priests running around, continuing to perform the Jesus-out-of the wine-and-wafer trick when they ought not to?
not Bruce, I don’t know about Catholics, but my husband used to be an Anglican. He said the assumption is that priests are not perfect. So asking a priest to completely avoid human temptations or slip ups is a violation of the creed.
I don’t know much more about it than that; my mind glazes over when people start in on finer points of Catholicism, Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Mormonisms…so on and on. Though I am fascinated by the sheer irrationality and popularity of religions, and read a lot about them, I struggle to maintain interest in finer points of liturgy.
The magical-mystery sacred status of priests was very much one of the dividing lines when Luther set off that whole Protestant thing. Protestants are opposed.
Anyone with the ability to turn water into (reportedly high-quality) wine could, at any stage of history, have made a fortune in the grog trade, particularly if he/she also ran a side operation making liquers, French champagne, fine single-malt Scotch whiskies and so on. Maybe not so much in the way of vodka, slivovitz etc.
Maybe by today we could have had a Jesus’ Own chain of liquor outlets in place of all those Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches. Can’t see how that would not have been a win-win all round, or an improvement over what we have finished up with.
I was never impressed with that water into wine business. Anyone can do that (with enough time, and a few other ingredients). Now show me someone who can turn water into a slightly smoky single malt whisky that keeps you pleasantly buzzed but never drunk or hungover, and doesn’t kill your liver, and I’ll sell everything and hop on board.
“A perfectly legal Eucharist should be possible with corn tortillas and Dr. Pepper, as long as that was the closest approximation to the required ingredients.”
Like apparently pork is OK for a Muslim to eat if the only alternative is starvation.
Sometimes a religion makes a concession to good sense.
Your Name’s not Bruce?
February 16, 2022 at 7:34 am
Well, merely being “corrupt” doesn’t make one not-a-priest. There are a handful of offenses that are considered to be ‘auto-excommunication’, as in, you’re excommunicated the moment you do them, even if no one knows it and the Pope never issues the official decree, unless you’ve later confessed and repented–most of them are heresies in relation to Church dogma, but they’ve also included ‘assisting or abetting an abortion’ in there.
So kid-fucking doesn’t make your baptisms invalid, unless you knocked up a sixteen-year-old parishioner and then smuggled her out of town long enough to visit Planned Parenthood.
Ladymondegreen@2, for about the tenth time now, you almost owe me a new computer keyboard because I practically spit out my tea, laughing!
The Catholic Church deserves to be attacked for its ridiculous rules and for the suffering those rules cause people. But why overplay the attack? Why attack it for things it does not teach? You will just have people dismissing what you say because you don’t know what you are talking about.
There may have been a time when the Church taught that people who were not validly baptized, through no fault of their own, would go to Hell. But, if so, that was centuries ago. The Church certainly does not teach that now.
And, for all those who are talking about the powers of priests, no special powers are needed for baptism. Anyone can baptize.
Fair point. I did put it that way without checking on current doctrine. But then what does the “invalid” mean? Just nothing?
What does ‘invalid’ mean? It means any number of things. It means that your confirmation is invalid. It means that your marriage is likely to be a natural marriage rather than a sacramental marriage. It means that you have never received the sacrament of penance (and that can sometimes lead to Hell). It means that you cannot receive the sacrament of Holy Orders and therefore,if you are a priest, any sacraments you give, by virtue of being a priest, are invalid. But what it does not mean is that you are going to Hell. And the advantage is that you can be baptized now and you will not only be forgiven all your sins but also let off all punishments for them.
Re off by a single pronoun, I hope you don’t mind this digression:
There is a story that is part of the Passover Haggadah, the story of the Four Sons (it’s almost always sons, sometimes children). One of the sons is referred to as “wicked”, sometimes “‘thoughtless”. Each of the sons asks (or attempts to ask) a question. The “wicked” son asks “what does this ritual mean to you?” Because he said “to you” instead of “to us”, the more hard-line versions of the story say that he has distanced himself from the Jewish people and would not have been freed by God, or would not have deserved to have been freed. This is a rather draconian pronouncement for having used a single incorrect pronoun.
There is a book about Secular Jewish identity by Mitchell Silver entitled “Defending the Wicked Child”. I’ve read the book (good book) and I’ve seen Silver speak about it. His basic argument regarding the story is that the “wicked” son at least is at the table; he may not agree with the statements, he may not follow the practices, but he’s still present, still trying to be part of the group, and that should count for something.
The next problem, for Catholics, is that all of the Sacraments follow from Baptism. If the baptism was not performed properly, then that person is not a Catholic. If they were confirmed? Too bad for them, no Holy Spirit! If they were ordained? Not a priest.
What a mess. Best to just chuck the whole thing.