Well, of course John Kerry and Ted Kennedy are both divorced and remarried and Ted has quite a checkered past, but I'm not privy to whether their public support of abortion is matched by their private practice of the same.
If divorced Catholics who are remarried without an annulment, and Catholics who live together in sin without being married, and Catholics who have had abortions, and Catholics who are involved in ongoing criminal ventures etc. are no longer allowed to have their children baptized, then I guess the same should hold for homosexuals' children.
Assuming the abortion is unrepented and unconfessed, I would agree with you down to the letter. All of those persons are living outside full communion with the church and cannot in good faith promise to bring up a child within it. "You can't give what you don't have."
Dear Bryher1,
Wow, that's quite a load. You've lumped a lot of unlike things together. Remember, though, that someone does not perform one thing properly doesn't mean that he is excused from performing anything properly. If priests and pastors regularly mishandle one kind of case, it does not create license to mishandle other types of cases.
To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Kennedy received a declaration of nullity, and I believe that Mr. Kerry has made a similar claim (although I've seen it disputed).
It gets a bit tricky beyond that, though. Like I said, you've lumped a lot of unlike things together.
Remember, two individuals who are not married but have a child together, are the actual parents of their child. Putting both their names on the baptismal certificate is a recognition of a biological fact - that these two individuals procreated this child.
It is far from an ideal situation. One hopes that they are living apart, and one hopes that they have resumed a chaste relationship. In this case, a pastor might use some discretion, and baptize the child, if the two parents are not publicly carrying on an ongoing immoral relationship. Even so, though I'd disagree with the pastor who permitted two publicly and brazenly cohabitating persons to baptize their child, nonetheless, putting both their names on the baptismal certificate is merely a recognition of the actual reality of the situation.
For two homosexuals living together in an immoral relationship, they cannot both be the biological parents of the child. Thus, to insist that both their names go on the baptismal certificate as "parents" requires that the Church recognize licitness of their relationship, a licitness which does not actually exist. It is to force the Church to recognize a lie as true.
For two homosexuals to put their names on a baptismal certificate is to ask the Church to affirm the lie of their alleged relationship, their alleged marriage. In placing both names on the baptismal certificate, it is not a recognition of the fact of actual biological parenthood, in that they cannot both be biological parents, but rather, it is the affirming of the artificial construct, in this case created by the state, of "homosexual marriage."
I can't see how a Catholic priest could justify such an action.
As for Catholics who have been directly and formally involved in procuring or performing abortions, without formal repentence in the confessional to a priest authorized to absolve them of their crime (a faculty which must specifically be granted to them by the bishop), they are in a state of excommunication, and if the pastor is aware of this, he should not permit them to present themselves as parents of a child to be baptized. Pastors who do this, in my opinion, err.
As for folks involved in ongoing illegal activities, well, I'd imagine that the pastor must have fairly certain knowledge of specific guilt to act on it.
sitetest