Catholic technicalities

God's quite the stickler for precise words, it turns out:

Thousands of baptisms at a Catholic church in Arizona have been invalidated because a priest used the wrong words in performing the ceremony.

Father Andres Arango resigned from the St Gregory parish church in Phoenix earlier this month after diocese leaders discovered he had mistakenly used the phrase “we baptize you” instead of “I baptize you” for years.

His error means that countless baptisms – an irrevocable requirement for salvation in Catholic theology – will have to be performed again. And some churchgoers could find their marriages are not recognized....

The fount of knowledge on the matter is the Vatican’s 2020 congregation for the doctrine of the faith, which along with declaring Covid-19 vaccines “morally acceptable” also spelled out the correct words that needed to be used during baptisms.

The congregation “affirms that baptisms administered with modified formulas are invalid, including: ‘We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’,” the Vatican announced.

The declaration was deemed necessary following questions over whether such phrasing meant that three separate holy entities were involved in the baptisms, or only one.

“The issue with using ‘We’ is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes,” Olmsted wrote in a message posted to the Diocese of Phoenix website.

I wonder if there is an Arizona lawyer looking at offering to sue for clerical negligence, citing emotional harm over concern that the client's deceased child didn't make it into heaven because of this?