Priest accidentally invalidates thousands of baptisms by using the wrong pronouns

This never would have happened (or at least come to light) if they still did baptisms in Latin as God intended. /s

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So the incantation must be recited precisely for the spell to work.
Fascinating…
Animated GIF

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Call in Bruce Almighty. He had those kinds of skills back in '03!

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As if the Church didn’t have enough problems, why not make a great big own-goal out of nothing :roll_eyes:

If the whole point is a priest is acting with and for God, and the priest and God are both present, and the priest and God are not the same person, then clearly “we” is the correct grammatical subject and everybody else has been doing it wrong

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I think it is maybe one of those magical trans-whatever-y things where at the moment the spell is cast the priest is God/Jesus whatever rather than his agent? Not sure, but I think that is the case in some other rituals too.

It is definitely true in many of the earlier religions that they yoinked all of this stuff from

:imagine all the eyeroll emoji in the world:

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Ellykay Annyay?

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I’m sure the appropriate Bishop or perhaps the Pope himself will fix this by shrugging and saying “s’allright” in public and that will be the end of it.

Should be a non-story.

I’m thinking people will be pitching movie scripts the lines of Dogma, where it is discovered that Saint Paul didn’t do some rite in exactly the right way, and as a result the Catholic church has been invalid for its whole history.

Alternatively, it turns out Jesus wasn’t himself properly baptized (maybe he was never totally submerged during his baptism?) and was never able to ascend to heaven as a result, so it’s just been the Sacred Duo instead of the Holy Trinity all this time. (And of course the Catholic church is again also invalid.)

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God: “Now, as to those of you who have been writing ‘G-d’ in an attempt to avoid writing my name…”

My friend’s mum would never let her Catholic mother bathe the kids, in case she sneakily tried to baptise them on the sly.
I don’t see the problem myself, do a Pascal’s Wager on it, take your kids down to all the local mosques/synagogues/churches/etc. and put them through all the possible ‘welcome the newborn child to the world’ ceremonies they’ve got going. You never know, one of them might work :slight_smile:

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There’s a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine district damnations,
One sure, if another fails;
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee?

Soliloquoy of the Spanish Cloister by Robert Browning.
Read the rest of it here

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“The holy word is inerrant.”

But honey, it’s in the bible!

I see you’ve never met my kids.

Afterlife considerations are all well and good. Then there’s the practical considerations for the dead. Don’t you have to be a Catholic to be buried in a Catholic cemetery? He’s been doing this since '95, at least a handful of his baptizees have died since then. Ignoring whether or not they’d actually do it, could they get kicked out?

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I wonder what Martin Luther would say about this? For that matter, what would Jesus say about it? Jesus was not a big fan of religious High Mucky Mucks who put Law above Love. For all that, check out Matthew 18:6, 'cause that’s what these legalistic clerics are doing.

Well that’s part of the problem, it’s easy to dismiss any criticism of apparent Catholic silliness as simply the ongoing expression of a schism, or even anti-Catholic bigotry

Martin Luther would probably say, “That’s stupid, get over it,” but of course he’s absolutely the last person any devout Catholic would ever look to for spiritual advice

Maybe they become vampires!!!

The daily beast begs to differ. God can make a stone that he can’t lift.

” But this isn’t the first time that the Roman Catholic Church has fought tense battles over the inclusion of single words or letters in statements or faith, nor is it the first time that baptism has been the focus of fierce disagreement and even schism.

In 325 A.D., after decades of heated theological debate and vicious ad hominem attacks, the Emperor Constantine I convened a meeting of bishops in Nicaea. The main subject under debate was the nature of Jesus and how best to describe his relationship to God the Father. Arius, a well-known Alexandrian priest, and his bishop, Alexander, were embroiled in a fierce dispute. Team Arius wanted to say that Jesus was homoiousios (of a slightly different substance than the Father), while Alexander and his supporters argued that he is homoousios (of the same substance as the Father). Philosophically speaking these are vastly different things: Either Jesus is or is not made of the same stuff as God. But, philologically, the contest couldn’t have been smaller: The whole controversy rests over the inclusion of a single letter—an iota or “i”—from which we get our modern expressions “an iota of difference” and “a jot of difference.”

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It’s only purgatory.