You Don’t Invite People to an Emergency Baptism

Argh argh argh argh. More horrible behavior from the Sussexes.

Baptism/Christening/Saining almost always happens at church or in a free-standing baptistry on church grounds, because it’s bringing a person into Christ’s Church.

(In fact, in medieval times in many countries, you were supposed to report with your kid to get baptized at the same church as everybody else in an entire diocese! This one church was the “mother church” or “matrix church”. If you see a town name that includes “matrix,” that’s what it’s talking about: the one place to get normally baptized.)

So usually, church baptisms. The only denominations where they do anything different are the denominations that go even further back, to the days when nobody had permanent church grounds, and so they do a John the Baptist and baptize in a stream somewhere. But even then, it’s almost always the same somewhere, and all kinds of people who are part of the same church will come.

The exceptions are emergency baptisms of people in danger of death (which happen at home or wherever the endangered person happens to be), or we-won’t-be-back-soon baptisms of people who live far away from a church or any minister. (Such as the eunuch who had to get back to Ethiopia, or people baptized by a traveling missionary minister or priest.)

Now, I’m sure that a lot of Harry’s acquaintances are UK noblemen with chapels or small parish churches right on their estates, down the road from the main house. In the old days, the Anglican church let such people hire the minister/priest who worked there, because they also paid for their guy’s salary. But even then, it was an official ordained Anglican guy, and regular church services had to happen there. So if they also had a baptismal font and used it, it was still quite official.

Meanwhile, there’s no suggestion that the estate at Montecito has an official Anglican chapel of any kind. There’s no suggestion that their genetic daughter Lilibet is in danger of death. They’ve let her christening go until now, endangering her soul.

And then, no doubt because some other celebrity had a big baptism party for his/her kids, they suddenly decide that they can do a press release on how the poor kid was christened at home. And they hauled in the Episcopal bishop of LA to do it (probably because he was shocked to hear that the kid wasn’t baptized yet, and decided he’d put up with their ridiculous power trip for the sake of the kid, and probably to make sure that toddler Archie is also alive and well).

It’s one of the rights of the baptized person to have everyone in the local church see them baptized and be witnesses, so as to avoid any canon law problems at the time of receiving other Sacraments.

So it’s good that the Sussexes are at least affording this knowledge to the world, even if they provided almost no witnesses to protect their daughter’s rights. A celebrity party is unlikely to be full of pious Christian witnesses; and LB’s parents are drug-users, so they’re not all that reliable. I suppose there’s always the housekeeping staff and the nannies; and presumably the Episcopal bishop will file the baptismal records at his own church.

But that’s just another example of the narcissistic behavior of these two non-carer parents with their two child accessories.

Still, a valid baptism is a valid baptism. Doing parental duties for selfish personal reasons and PR is at least getting the job done.