Case LXXXV: Baptism of Children the Offspring of Civil Marriages

A Jew, named Israel, married Sempronia, who was the child of a mixed marriage. She had been baptized a Catholic, but practised no religion at all. They were married before the registrar. At the birth of their first child, a girl, they both wished her to receive Catholic baptism. The priest, being aware that this was not always granted in similar cases, went to see them, and tried to induce them to promise that all the children who might subsequently be born should be baptized and brought up as Catholics, for if two persons after contracting a civil marriage give this pledge, it is possible to obtain a dispensation from the law prohibiting marriage between a baptized and an unbaptized person. The Jew Israel refused to be baptized himself, and he would not consent to make any promise, saying that the eldest son at least must be a Jew, so as to be able to recite the customary prayers when he himself died and on the anniversary of his death.

If Israel had made the promise a dispensation ab impedimento disparitatis cultus could have been obtained, and the ecclesiastical marriage performed sub passiva assistentia. Sempronia might have begun to practise her religion again, and the marriage between Jew and Christian would have been valid before the law and the Church. It would have been a mixed marriage, in which all the children were to be brought up as Catholics.

Israel would agree to nothing, and Sempronia, who had practised no religion for sixteen years, accepted with complete indifference the Bishop's decision that the child could not receive Catholic baptism, and it remained unbaptized; it was most unlikely that it would have been brought up as a Catholic. Only three years before Sempronia had been attending lessons on Christian doctrine at school, but the fact that she selected a Jewess to act as godmother reveals her state of mind. It was only when the priest pointed out to her the impossibility of having a Jewish godmother that she chose a Catholic, but one who never sent her own child to Mass on Sundays.

The end of the matter was that the Catholic godmother took the child to be baptized in the Lutheran Church. Thus the father was a Jew, the mother had no religion and the child was a Protestant! Such are the results of the teaching of the present day!—Karl Krasa.