Posted on 08/06/2017 3:49:20 PM PDT by ebb tide
Marriage and baptism are not bourgeois rites of passage. We need to make them easier
There are plenty of things for which I thank God: good friends, the health of my children, the glorious tenth anniversary of Summorum Pontificum, the fact that the Detroit Tigers will not be trading their star pitcher Justin Verlander. Another is the fact that my wife and I were never made to attend a Catholic marriage preparation course.
If we had been members of a parish where the mind-numbingly dull half-year of expensive weekend retreats had been required, we would have gone through with it, obviously. Offering up suffering is a gift of the Holy Ghost denied even to the glorious angels in heaven.
I say this because it is only as a kind of purgative trial justly demanded of the pious faithful by Mother Church in the exercise of her disciplinary infallibility that it is possible to make sense of the six-month-long exercise in mandatory tedium known in the US as “Pre-Cana” (the mawkish reference to Our Lord’s first miracle is worthy of Hallmark). The spiritually edifying qualities of these rectory chats on subjects such as “Conflict Resolution Skills” and “Finances” are best summed up by secular interpolators at a website called BridalGuide.com:
You may be wondering, what exactly is Pre-Cana? Don’t worry … you won’t be hearing lectures about going to church every week and going to Confession. It’s more like pre-marital counselling, to help prepare you for marriage.
In our case, marriage counselling meant two 20-minute conversations with our pastor. This is as it should be. When it comes to marriage, Shakespeare’s Friar Lawrence is a model shepherd of souls. A good student of St Paul, he knows what marriage is for, which is why his first priority is the avoidance of sin, not the maintenance of community standards. Indeed, I have always found modern-day adaptations of the play implausible, because today’s Romeo and Juliet would have had to spend a considerable portion of their young lives taking quizzes on “Spirituality/Faith” and “Careers” in order to get the go-ahead from their diocese.
The way the post-conciliar Church cordons off the sacraments is a perfect example of how she has become insufferably middle-class. Working-class people and bohemian misfits like me are not community-minded. We loathe the notion of therapy, especially if it involves making small talk with people we don’t know about things that are very dear to our hearts. People with real jobs often work on Saturdays; they haven’t got time or money for couples’ weekend retreats to horse farms with Fr Dialogue.
Meanwhile, middle-class people enjoy being treated like (rather stupid) children. They like play-time and share-time and snack-time and loathe the idea of privacy; they enjoy shaking hands and holding hands, which is why their favourite parts of the new Mass are the Sign of Peace and the standing-up Paternoster. They take positive delight in these things for the same mysterious reasons that they enjoy working for those companies that require semi-annual “team-building exercises” – scavenger hunts and other pre-teen activities between mandatory presentations on LGBTQ sensitivity.
The only thing worse than current Church practice regarding marriage is the preposterous bureaucracy that prevents children from being baptised in a timely fashion. Requiring Catholic parents to take courses on the subject is ludicrous and a deathly waste of time. All that the average layman need know can be gleaned from the old Baltimore Catechism. “Baptism is a Sacrament which cleanses us from original sin, makes us Christians, children of God, and heirs of heaven.” It would be very difficult to stretch that into a four-weekend course.
A friend of mine in Texas has been waiting six months to have his daughter baptised. First he was required to take a class, even though he and his wife are on their third child. Then after wasting time over the course of several successive weekends, he was told that the girl’s prospective godparents also required instruction, despite they themselves being the parents of several Catholic children. Now he finds himself waiting for a ‘‘slot’’; apparently in some dioceses, it is expected that only a predetermined number of children – around four per weekend at most, unless it is done in Spanish; apparently this makes a difference to Our Lord – can be cleansed of original sin and initiated into the Christian faith.
This is nonsense. My older daughter was baptised when she was a week old. All I had to do to secure for Thisbe Perpetua the remission of sin and an heirdom in the Kingdom of Heaven was to call Fr H down at the rectory to let him know that my wife had had the baby (he was expecting my call: good priests know things like which of their parishioners are pregnant): “How does Saturday at eleven sound?”
That, and one piece of paper from her godfather’s parish attesting to his being a communicant, were the only requirements. He supplied the salt and the chrism and a Latin pamphlet with the Exorcízo te and all the other forgotten glories of the Roman Rite; we brought the baby. Afterwards we drank champagne.
To treat matrimony and baptism as if they were bourgeois rites of passage – like finishing secondary school or moving into one’s first apartment – is not only ugly. It is a denial of the efficacy of the sacraments.
Our priest makes each family meet with him in person before they can enroll their children in Catechism and he said he was going to require them to attend at least one class with each child. The children are required to go to mass weekly and get their cards signed by him or the DRE. Supposedly, if they miss one mass or one class in Confirmation or First Communion they can’t receive the sacrament but I haven’t seen him kick anyone out.
After 1st Communion they are required to be altar servers and if the parents don’t send them back the next year he calls them and the kids usually show up.
On Baptisms he’s pretty easy, the parents don’t have to be married or anything but their Godparents must be Catholics in good standing and the parents and Godparents must take a 4 hour class.
We never see a lot of those families again until they start Catechism.
In my classes I usually have 1 or 2 kids who know anything about the faith from home. Most don’t pray, they don’t read the Bible.
He’s very strict but not mean and we have about 3 times as many students as we had before he came but most of them don’t come to mass during the summer.
I wish I could remember the Pre-Cana my future wife and I went through during my senior year at St. Joseph’s College, of Indiana, along with a couple of dozen other couples who were intending to get married after graduation. It was for 2 hours one evening a week for 6 weeks. Various aspects of being married were discussed: life as a married couple, finances, having children, and other topics. Both priests and/or lay members of the faculty taught the classes, depending upon the evening’s topic. We found it useful and for somethings should have paid better attention (no not on family planning for any wiseacres out there.)
Whoa! Better double check about the tea, Coke, gin and tonic, etc.!
I am pretty certain that at least some of those liquids would be invalid, and maybe all of them.
It takes 3 years in law school to become a lawyer. It takes at least 8 years to become a priest. It takes Dominican Sisters 7 years before they profess perpetual vows. It takes a few 20 minute classes to get married. Anybody see a problem?
When we are considering vocations, and something as important as marriage, doesn’t it deserve some serious thought, discussion, and spiritual guidance? Perhaps better marriage formation is the answer.
Regarding Baptism classes, I’m sure more people went to CCD than Catholic school. They probably don’t remember very much from their 6th grade discussion.
Yeah, people work on Saturday. However, should the church do nothing in the formation or preparation for the vocation of marriage?
The validity of any sacrament is unaffected by the state of grace or state of sin of the minister of the sacrament, or the recipient.
Anyone, baptized or not, can baptize.
He loves the Sacraments and would like to have access to them without all the useless mandatory classes which do not address sin and salvation but money and nice names for the baby.
Yeah; I see a huge a problem. To delay the baptism of newborns of a practicing Catholic family is reprehensible. These parishes are risking the salvation of those innocent children.
Shouldn't baptism and child-rearing have been covered in a "pre-cana" class before the couple was allowed to marry?
I’m not a follower of the RCC personally. But through the centuries what is the normal time that a newborn would be sprinkled or Christened? Are we normally talking a few days after being born, weeks, months? Immediately?
What is the historical standard a Catholic parent would expect to be a normal time to do it within?
We just had 26 Baptisms at our church, and, yes, all the parents had to take classes or else their children couldn’t get baptized.
A neighboring church recently held 59 baptisms. I don’t know about the classes there.
Even if they had older, church-going children?
Why risk a newborn's salvation?
I doubt your parish had 26 children born within one week or, in another parish, 59 born in one week.
That's nothing to be proud of - that baptisms are delayed until a quorum is met.
Infant baptisms should be done as soon as possible; even it interferes with the priest's "schedule".
This guy’s disdain for the middle class is palpable.
Church aside, I don’t know middle class folks who are like the ones he described.
His pride in being *different* and above all that is nasty.
They were of varying ages. Families accompanied them. (At least in my parish.)
Well that in itself is a shame.
Why the delay for the older ones?
I've never seen an infant baptism where the family and godparents are not present.
Have you?
Good sermons, EWTN radio and cable fill the bill.
That's ridiculous. Unmarried parents of a child are not in good standing with the Church; yet the godparents are required to be in good standing?
i don’t think it’s ridiculous. Suppose your teen age daughter got pregnant. It happens. Would you want the baby to be baptized? The role, as I understand it, of Godparents is a Catholic upbringing, so they are supposed to be capable of providing that.
In our parish, it’s a one hour one night class, which is usually done before the child arrives. They don’t come all that suddenly.
you only have to go to classes on your first child’s baptism, apparently some parishes are different.
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