Baptism of children of gay couples depends on the parish priest

Baptising the child of two fathers: the Church decides case by case

The baptism of babies of lgtb couples is the scenario that opens the debate. There is no new rite and no general dispensation. There is a parish priest, a font and a canon. Canon 868 requires a "founded hope" that the child will be raised in the Catholic faith and orders the sacrament to be deferred when that hope is entirely absent. From there on, everything is interpretation. And the person who interprets is a single individual: the priest of the parish.

What does the Catholic Church require to baptise a baby?

The canonical text makes no mention of the parents' sensual orientation. One participant also points out that the rule was written at a time when such a scenario was not even contemplated, so the answer to whether the child of two fathers can be baptised is not written anywhere in those words. What is written is the criterion: a reasonable expectation of an upbringing in the faith.

From this flow two opposing readings. One holds that the priest is obliged to baptise anyone who asks, no questions asked, and that the more baptised the better: the sacrament as a soul counter. The other replies that administering the rite with no expectation whatsoever of a Catholic upbringing empties it of all meaning and turns the Church into something else.

Original sin, the argument that clogs up the discussion

The second front is older. Some argue that everyone born to Catholic parents comes into the world with original sin and that baptism washes it away: hence the rush to baptise as early as possible. Others counter that original sin was cancelled by Christ's sacrifice and that baptism is, above all, symbolic; that someone born innocent needs no rescue. The disagreement was not settled with quotations, but with labels of Protestant heresy and doctrinal illiteracy.

The third front is consent. Enrolling someone in a religious confession before they are old enough to reason, it is argued, means deciding for someone who cannot refuse. The classic defence is confirmation: an adult ratification that leaves the door open to walk away. It sounds reasonable on paper. In practice, the one who never comes back simply never comes back.

From rural Galicia to an Opus Dei school: when the obstacle was not the couple

The specific cases that come up in the conversation do not involve gai couples. One person recounts that a parish priest refused to baptise her son in rural Galicia in the 1990s because she could not prove she was not doing it to get gifts. Elsewhere in the same account the opposite appears: a priest baptised her daughter patiently while the little girl tried to eat the book.

And a third episode, told by another participant: a nephew forced to make his First Communion in order to be admitted to an Opus Dei school that his father's company paid for. Pure formalism. There the sacrament was not faith, it was enrolment. Which shows, according to that account, that the parish priest's discretion, and the conditions for access to educational or social networks, weigh more than any doctrinal discussion.

Baptism as a social formality

Much of the matter can be explained without theology. An atheist admits he had his children baptised for folkloric reasons and to make their grandparents happy. And a participant replies, without offering any source, that "99.9% of the people who go to Mass on Sundays" do it for the same social convention. Added to this is the diagnosis of an institution credited with plummeting numbers and a drift in course placed in the pontificate of Francis or earlier.

Seen this way, baptising the child of two fathers is not a liturgical revolution: it is the same old administration of formalities, with new applicants for the request. What is unsettling is not the rite. It is who appears in the photo.

When the conversation left theology behind

The exchange also degenerated. There were generalisations about gai people —including claims about mental health and behaviour with no scientific backing whatsoever, which are not reproduced here— and resort to specific incivil incidents to argue that adoption should be banned. The mechanism is an old one: a single case turned into a rule about an entire group. No statistic supports that leap.

On the political front, it is claimed that normalisation obeys a calculation, and openly gai elected officials in right-wing parties in France and Germany are mentioned, along with two Spanish far-right leaders accused of hypocrisy without any evidence offered. With no data to quantify it, it is a hypothesis, not a finding.

The inherited prejudice that surfaces at the end

Towards the end of the thread a family memory appears: an elderly woman scolding a child for spitting in the street with an anti-Jewish superstition learned by tradition, five centuries after the expulsion. It serves as a reminder of where the institution now debating whether to open the font to a baby with two fathers comes from. Two thousand years of refoundations and councils go a long way.

That is where the analysis stalls. Neither banned nor mandatory: discretionary. There is no public record of how many baptisms of this kind are performed each year, so nobody knows whether it is a trend or four photos. And founded hope still has no operational definition. Until it does, the doctrine is applied by each parish priest according to his own judgement and his own roster of baptisms.