God, how I despise supernatural pettiness. The RCC leadership and I have been on the outs for several years, but this kind of bullshit helps maintain that status quo, Francis or no. Hell, it wakes up the dormant cradle Lutheran within me. I don't even worship with the Lutherans anymore, but this sort of nonsense takes me right back to confirmation class and that quiet revolutionary fire they keep carefully tucked away behind the nervous smiles and the lutefisk. Who the hell do these bishops think they are, to tell us what form of baptism God does or does not accept? They do not create the baptism, they only administer it, and even proper Roman Catholic doctrine has always been that any sacrament performed
in extremis is valid. Remember when they used to use this as an excuse to
kidnap Jewish babies who had supposedly been baptized by their nursemaids? How is
that okay but a priest accidentally using the wrong formula is not?
It also doesn't make sense that they are "generously" offering to correct the error. This error, if it is a true error, cannot be corrected. Some of those affected will surely have died before the "fix" could be offered, and of those who haven't, many of them may well have taken Communion by now, which is considered a mortal sin if you aren't baptized for the same bullshit reasons as the above. When I was enrolled at a parochial school briefly in my teenage years, I was assured most solemnly upon enrolling that I would burn in hell if I tried to take the Eucharist along with my Catholic fellow-students at Wednesday mass, as my own baptism had been performed outside of the RCC. I was "allowed" (again with the faux generosity) to go forward and receive a blessing at Communion time, as long as I kept my arms folded over my chest to mark myself as a unwashed heretic.
