Above is a family I baptized into the Catholic Church.
In my last article, I described how easy it was for non-Catholics to receive Holy Communion at nearly 99% of the Novus Ordo Mass (NOM) parishes of the world. This is because there is no longer priestly oversight. This is due to several reasons I proved in that article.
But to add insult to injury, those same priests (who give Communion to strangers) will not give baptism to those same strangers seeking entrance into the Catholic Church! At least, such leftist priests will not allow baptism without months of red-tape on the paperwork and endless hurdles on catechesis (which is rarely orthodox.) This is obviously due to the widespread heresy of indifferentism, usually labeled “ecumenism.”
Some liberal priests will even tell potential converts to the Catholic faith that they need not convert, for they are saved anyway. I have even heard cases of liberal priests discouraging converts to the Catholic faith to enter the Church! But today’s article will tackle the less extreme cases of mainstream priests moving very slowly in helping willing-converts to enter the faith.
I admit there is some diversity in the history of the Catholic Church in regards to how hard it was to get baptized. For example, in the Southern Hemisphere, the great Jesuits St. Francis Xavier and St. Peter Claver only required five seconds of consent from the catechumen following the priest’s five minute presentation on heaven and hell. On the other hand, the Jesuits in North America were more cautious about potential Native American converts backsliding post-baptism. Thus, they had longer period of the catechumenate than their tropical Jesuit counterparts.
But never in the history of the Catholic Church have priests outsourced pre-sacramental catechetical prep of non-Catholics to lay people at the local parish. At least, not until the last 60 years. What this has led to is that it is extremely difficult for non-Catholics to enter the Church without a bunch of worthless classes and endless paperwork. Who then could be behind such a practice preventing baptism for the willing? In the words of Dana Carvey on SNL, could it be….mmmmmm…. satan?
Yet this modern practice has also affected the belief of Catholics today. Most Catholics today think coming into the Church (or coming back to the Church) is harder than it really is. Yes, you read that correctly. For all the times we traditionalists get called “rigorous” or “severe” or “Jansenistic” the fact is that the tradition of the Catholic Church actually made it very easy for Jews, infidels and pagans to enter the Catholic Church.
But to demonstrate how many Catholics have imbibed modernist priests’ practice into their psyche, I will write very briefly about two recent conversations I had.
1) My sister told me about her friend… who decided to come back to the Catholic Church after being a baptized Catholic who had been gone for decades. Her friend suspected hours of meetings, paperwork and classes. I told my sister: “Tell your friend all it takes is a good confession and she’s back to the Church.” My sister looked at me surprised. Perhaps she was surprised this pathway of ease was coming from me! But I doubled-down: “No classes, no paperwork, no nothing. Just have her make a good confession and she’s Catholic again.” I was later confident I gave the right answer, especially since her friend was studying the faith quite a bit following the reversion of her heart and mind.
2) A former spiritual-directee told me about her mother… who got married outside the Catholic Church years ago. Her mother has been afraid to go back for years, not sure what to do with her “civil husband.” Yet they have been together for a long time, and there appears to be no danger of separation. So, I said to her: “Tell your mother she can get their civil marriage convalidated in the Catholic Church in a 15 minute ceremony if she gets the dispensation to marry a non-Catholic—which they always give.”
She too was surprised that me (of all people) sounded lax in the sacraments. But no, this is the tradition of the Church! I also encouraged her to have her mother’s civil husband accept Christ and the Catholic faith, but she told me that he was already on his way.
Similarly, St. Francis Xavier often encountered Portuguese sailers who were shacking up with Indonesian women who they had not married in the Church yet. To “get them out of sin” (so to speak) he would quickly marry them as long as they planned on staying together and have children. (St. Francis obviously would have required or at least encouraged the pagan to get baptized before the wedding.) Yet St. Francis Xavier was much much more careful about who received Holy Communion at his Masses.
But today, most novus priests are hyper-vigilant about who approaches baptism, yet ironically lax in Eucharistic-protection against those living in original sin or mortal sin. To the contrary of today’s practice, the saints for 19 centuries actually made it much easier to enter the Catholic Church via baptism, yet were extremely careful about reception of Holy Communion by Catholics in irregular situations and of course never let non-Catholics receive Holy Communion.
It’s all more proof that the modernist church is not slightly different from the Apostolic Church, but different in every way possible. The fact is that all priests (NOM or TLM) need to make it a lot easier to enter the faith if we want to populate heaven and imitate the greatest missionary saints. As I wrote at the end of the last article (with certain caveats) baptism needs to be a lot easier to obtain and Communion a lot harder. That’s how the Apostles and all the saints saw it.
Oh, and if you think I’m writing this just because I’m grumpy for leaving parish life, look who else left American parish life after Vatican II, so you can see how the old-school way of sacraments worked better:
