Priest accidentally invalidates thousands of baptisms by using the wrong pronouns

Now they’ll never get into magic space camp!!!

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At last, one more revealing glimpse into the nature of God: Omni-pedantic.

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Western musical notation was created because the Catholic church discovered monks who learned plainchant (a.k.a. Gregorian chant) by word of mouth were singing the text differently in different parts of Europe.

A far cry from qawwali where the singers never do the song exactly the same twice.

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Not a big deal compared to the 1631 edition of the King James’ Bible, known as the “Wicked Bible”, where the printer accidentally dropped the word ‘not’ from one of the commandments, so that the resulting text read “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

The printer was fined £300 (around $70,000 in today’s money) and lost his license to print, which is pretty lenient considering how folks felt about religious matters in those days.

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Imagine all of those falsely baptized believers who are shocked to find that they are now burning in hell for all eternity.

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Thetis and her son have entered the chat.

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As homebrew, just make sure that you boil the hell out of it.

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The absurdity of this. That such a minute difference could invalidate the clear intentions of everyone involved. (And the objection to the language difference doesn’t even make sense to me - the church states that only Jesus [“and Christ alone”] can baptize, not the community - so how is “I” even appropriate when spoken by the priest, even if he is Jesus’ official rep?) It’s the kind of bureaucratic intolerance that would make the most officious government employee look askance at it.

“God hates ‘we’.” (Let’s see that on a t-shirt.)

Given how long this has been going on (and apparently there are other priests making this same mistake), a whole bunch of people aren’t technically Catholics and had invalid communions, marriages, etc. Some of those people must have died, and aren’t going to heaven* because all the things they did that were supposed to allow that were technically invalid, unbeknownst to them. The amount of suffering this is going to cause to affected individuals and their families…

*Though I’m now remembering that the church officially got rid of Limbo a few years back, so… everything’s cool, maybe? The hint of ambiguity would still be distressing for the loved ones of those who passed on unbaptized, though. If none of those ceremonies really mean anything, then why do them, after all.

The Church used to have Limbo specifically for these kinds of situations (e.g. unbaptized babies) that seems like it would apply here, but they dispensed with it a few years back in favor of going straight to heaven. So I guess these people are alright, even if they died before that point because shutting down Limbo was retroactive.

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But @thomdunn, does… :stuck_out_tongue:

ETA: Also, isn’t this quite literally an example of a clerical error?

… I’ll see myself out.

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More like a glimpse of the nature of humanity. God is probably doing a double facepalm.

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It may seem like I’m defending catholicism here but I’m not… my personal opinion on this is, if it’s real, God knows what the end result would be and wouldn’t really adjust those final destinations.

The Church though? Has a fuckton of paperwork and busywork to do now.

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It’s a little more specific than that from what I understand.

The hang up was that “we” implies the community. And the community does not have the power to baptize. “I” indicates the priest who does.

It’s likely that the priest meant “we” to be the Church, who do have the power to baptize.

And this is all the result of a recent decision clarifying the formal language and liturgy that should be used.

It’s not some deeply held immutable dogma or vast new change. Just seems like a theological technicality no one thought through before they made it a thing.

Simple enough to solve by just adopting another argument.

The fact they just dumb shitted their way into a big theological crisis, and haven’t Poped it away yet is kinda the thing here.

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I primarily attend services in Spanish. The prayers are absolutely different than what I remember from English growing up.

Heck, the Lord’s Prayer has changed multiple times in both languages and, to the best of my recollection, the original author never once has come around complaining about it being invalid.

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Yes, this. The priest is the intercessor between Christ and humans. The Church doesn’t even have that role. So it’s not accurate to say “we.”

And, yes, technicalities, technicalities.

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Right.

And the solution is as simple as running with something like “we” as referring collectively to all priests as they act collectively through The Church. Or that it is the kingly “we” used appropriately by clergy down to their position as God’s representatives on Earth.

It’s the only Jesus → Church → Clergy pathway here that’s dogmatic. Anything past that is entirely alterable so long as you make a plausible theological argument and cite some stuff backing it up.

It’s the fact that they can not deal with this anything like quickly. And they created the whole situation in the first place by addressing and escalating something that probably doesn’t need a complex theological justification that’s telling.

Priests should not be resigning over this, and there shouldn’t be this potentially huge problem spewing out of it.

There were probably like 4 practicing Catholics who actually gave shit before it escalated to “wait the Vatican says everyone I know is going to hell”.

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All those kids are going straight to hell. God is petty that way. He takes grammar very seriously.

Cracking Up Lol GIF by Rodney Dangerfield

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I learned that heaven and hell don’t exist long ago from John Lee Hooker

(the image is from Hooker’s 1959 album, but this recording is Hooker with Canned heat in 1964)

When I read this story, the thing that stood out to me was the number of people whose marriages are retroactively invalidated, whose jobs in the clergy are likewise invalidated. This guy screwed up a lot of lives (and the church is kinda dickish to upend the lives of hundreds of believers over “I vs we.”)

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Why can’t the pope wave some mumbo-jumbo stick around, say some shit in latin and call it done? Essentially, cast a spell so that a bunch of believers can have one less existential worry on this rock hurtling through space, FFS.

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