Oh, my kid got baptized all right, and it counts, but the Catholic Church doesn’t just do a redo for the crowd. My bad.
I was horrified. I had called over to our church to arrange the second baptism when I was unceremoniously informed that “we don’t do that.” I almost panicked, but since I was driving, I managed to stay on the road and try to clarify. The lady was being basically nice, but very firm. No deal.
My kid’s an Anglican? I’m not even sure what that is!
I called back and asked for an appointment with the big man. Usually, if your heart is in the right place, Catholics are pretty forgiving. I believe I read that somewhere in my 12 years of Catholic education.
This was not the first time The Church had given me trouble. Oh, I was a Doubting Thomas in school and had all kinds of questions the nuns couldn’t answer. “That’s why they call it Faith, Daniel,” they would say; but I’m not talking about that stuff. When Michele and I went to get married, holy cow what an ordeal. They made us go through a few weeks of classes and wanted her to convert before they would book the church for us. I don’t remember my brother going through all that when he married a Baptist.
So I wrote a scathing letter to the head of the diocese in St Pete, the biggest guy for our area. Being a veteran of catholic schools, I knew how to lay on the guilt, and I pretty much called him out. Other churches don’t try to humiliate their parishioners by making them jump through hoops or feel inferior, and this whole business of classes and conversions didn’t seem to have the catholic divorce rate any better than anybody else’s – that’s a touchy one, I know – and if I can’t get married they way I want to, in the church and faith I grew up in, rest assured I will still be getting married.
In the end, they saw the light. Or I did, by writing a bigger check for the use of the church. Either way, we got it done.
Come back tomorrow for the next installment of Savvy Stories Chapter 3!
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