Considering the declining retention rate I don’t feel like they have the room to lose 20 years of Catholics, pope should just right them a note to give to St. Peter saying they’re excused
what about the people who were baptised by him and then died in the intervening 20 years? do their families just have to accept that their loved one is going to hell because some dude fucked up the paperwork?
The funniest outcome I have seen from this whole issue is a handful of priests have come forward also stating they used “We”
THEN a whole different priest saw his own baptism video and saw his OWN baptism was done wrong as well so he isn’t technically baptized….which to be a priest you have to be baptized, so he isn’t even a real priest any more!
So part of what’s wild about this is that “if you didn’t do the ritual precisely then it doesn’t count” is… not normally the rule for misspoken Catholic sacraments, and especially not for baptisms.
Like, just as an example, imagine that a Catholic priest is consecrating communion - doing the whole sleight-of-hand “turn bread and wine into Jesus’s literal flesh and blood except it still behaves exactly like bread and wine” thing - and flubs his lines. So long as he is (1) an actual Catholic priest, and (2) trying in good faith to do it correctly, it still works! The priest might get in trouble for saying the wrong prayer, but the congregation will still be getting Real Jesus Bread.
But more importantly… imagine that someone gets baptized by some random Protestant denomination, in like, a literal river. The sect that did it might not even have priests, and almost certainly doesn’t have “proper” ones from a Catholic point of view.
But if that person later wants to join the Catholics, they still don’t baptize them again. The baptism is still considered a baptism! This goes all the way back to Saint Paul, who was very insistent in the letters he was writing to churches all over the Mediterranean that “a baptism is a baptism is a baptism” to try to keep everyone from excommunicating each other while they still had to worry about Christians getting fed to lions and so forth.
So like. The fact that there’s a letter from Rome that went out a couple years ago retroactively invalidating these baptisms is weird. It’s not the normal way this stuff is done.
And it makes me wonder if, like, the letter that did the retroactive forbidding of “we” might have been intended as some kind of Take That against some very recent discourse among the clergy that the author thought was heretical (& thought they could detect via this wording trick), and they just didn’t realize that other priests might have been doing it before then, unrelated to the Topic of the day, on complete accident!
