God cares about pronouns

Tragic news: a priest was carrying out baptisms wrongly. These were botched baptisms!

The diocese, which is trying to identify people baptized by Arango, set up a FAQ section on its website to confront issues related to the botched baptisms and also created a form for people who were initiated into the church by the priest to complete.

Arango’s error was in saying, “We baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” when he should have begun the sentence by saying, “I baptize you.”

“The issue with using ‘We’ is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Christ alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes,” Bishop Thomas Olmsted wrote in a mid-January message on the diocese’s site.

Think of all the Catholics baptized by a priest who erred in the precise formula: all the priests who stuttered, or sneezed, or paused too long at some random point in the incantation, or worst of all, spoke the rite in the wrong language. I don’t know what the right language is, but it’s probably not English or modern Italian. God is very finicky about these things, I guess.

It’s probably not German, either, which explains Hitler. Do they say “du” or “Sie” in the correct version? Maybe they’ve been getting it wrong all this time.

I wonder if the Catholic Church is more angry at the priest who screwed up the baptisms than they are at the priests who diddled choir boys?