No Cheers for Father Keane?
McCarthy, Abigail
NO CHEERS FOR FATHER KEANE? ABIGAIL MeCA1RTHY In Chatham on Cape Cod, where I spent the summer, people swim, sail, play tennis, golf and garden during the day and in the evening gather over...
...Whatever Monsignor thought, Eleanor is not in most Lives o/ The Saints...
...And why did she wait three months...
...A woman who no longer goes to church, but was brought up a Presbyterian and presumably antihierarchical, feR that it was the absolute duty of Cardinal Medeiros to order the child baptized...
...The bishop was renowned for his relevance and the prospective godfather was reported to be connected to the CIA, but the reason for the rejection was purely traditional...
...Without making any judgments, I thought that my limited experience indicated that Mrs...
...What does the faith offer you...
...If she was so contemporary in one way, why so uncontemporary in another...
...At any rate, my father pulled "Eleanor" out of the air...
...Clair, both members of the local golf club, or with James Rowe, advisor to Presidents since Rcosevelt's time and a member of the beach and tennis club...
...I heard a man in the Barnstable Inn dining room protest loudly to his daughter, "But the Catholics will baptize anybody, anybody--even gangsters...
...Godparent: "The faith...
...My mother had she been there---they baptized babies in those days before the mother was up and aboutlmight have argued that her sister, aunt and grandaunt had been so baptized in that very parish...
...After all, I was baptized, my children were baptized, and I had been a godmother, or a proxy one, seventeen times...
...Eternal life...
...Mary at Dedham-West Roxbury, to offer to (Continued on page 4.5) i 11 October 1974:30...
...When I was a Catholic I baptized my children with the water from my bedside table in the hospital...
...I wasn't taking any chances on Limbo for my children, thank you...
...Dissident students of my acquaintance tend to decry infant baptism as a trap making them Catholic statistics before they had any free choice...
...There is a certain gamesmanship even to this last and a pleasant sense of importance, however fleeting, if you can claim any special expertise on the Topic...
...Of course, I was sure that a mother who would not renounce Mr...
...Pastors of more than one denomination were apt to impose conditions for baptism in the past--however one might deplore the fact...
...That's what matters...
...It was evidently the same concern about Limbo that prompted Father John Keane, pastor of the irregular chapel of St...
...It was with a certain sense of expectation that I realized that the Marlboro Baptism was emerging as the current subject...
...It came right after the Resignation and just before the Pardon--subjects on which I could not hope to compete with Thomas (Tip) O'Neill or /ames St...
...Why hung up on infant baptism...
...On the other hand I had no answer for the former Catholic (now a devout Protestant)--admittedly a rather structured personality--who asked me, "Doesn't she know that the minister of baptism can be any baptized lay person...
...Roger at St...
...But I didn't think you believed in infant baptism," I said...
...A Roman Catholic godfather was not acceptable for a child seeking faith from the Protestant Episcopal Church...
...I thought people so keen about the fine points of tennis and bridge might appreciate doctrinal and rubrical fine points as well, and, when it came to baptism, I thought I was as knowledgeable as anyone belonging to the beach club...
...There was the Unitarian Universalist of 80...
...Monsignor Maximilian Wurst refused to baptize me "Abigail" because he did not think it a fit name for a Christian...
...Morreale's plight was not without precedent...
...But of course I don't, my dear," she said, "but that has nothing to do with it...
...I had even had some mild brushes with clerical intransigence about baptism in the past, although the first, having occurred at my own christening, was a matter of hearsay...
...Then not so many years ago in Washington a family friend was rejocted as godfather by the suffragan Episcopal bishop of the diocese, also a family friend--it was embarrassing all around...
...and people were quite excited about it...
...And as for the new theologians---I know as one of them puts it, "many Catholic parents, teachers, and catechists are asking themselves why we baptize in infancy at all, and what their responsibilities are to the young people and children who have been baptized...
...ABIGAIL MeCA1RTHY In Chatham on Cape Cod, where I spent the summer, people swim, sail, play tennis, golf and garden during the day and in the evening gather over drinks and bridge to discuss yacht club races, tennis and golf scores and the Topic of the Day...
...They took positions at once...
...The first response "made by the godparent on the child's behalf" still comes trippingly to my tongue...
...The baptism was a different matter...
...Priest: "What do you ask of the Church of God...
...I went down on the parish register as Eleanor Abigail, destined to be at a disadvantage thereafter in competition with classmates named Margaret Mary and Mechtilde whose patron saints were well known...
...Baird and his abortion clinic on her child's behalf would not have settled for a different name or a new godfather, either...
...It is unlikely that the monsignor would have yielded, those baptisms having been done by the French, therefore suspect, priests who preceded him...
...The woman wants her child baptized...
...The daughter observed that the gangsters' gangsterism might not be a matter of public knowledge, but he was unappeased...
...But there were things I was not so sure about...
Vol. 101 • October 1974 • No. 2
