Word: baptism
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...Right to Baptism...
...Carol Morreale, 20, and her husband Daniel, 23, the second Sunday of August was to have been a day of celebration. On that day the couple had planned to take their three-month-old son Nathaniel to Immaculate Conception Church in Marlboro, Mass., for his baptism as a Roman Catholic. Guests were beginning to gather for a gala baptismal party. Then the phone rang: a call from Father John J. Roussin, assistant pastor of the church. Was she the same Carol Morreale who had been quoted in a Marlboro newspaper as supporting the establishment of an abortion-information clinic...
...population) town of Marlboro. The antis were lined up solidly behind a proposal to ban abortion clinics in the city. The defenders of the clinics, some of them Catholics like the Morreales, were led by an outsider, Abortion Advocate William Baird of Long Island. After their baby's baptism was halted, the distraught Morreales called Baird for advice, and he flew to Boston eager for a public showdown. Unfortunately, perhaps, the archdiocese of Boston was in a mood to oblige...
Church officials first quietly offered the Morreales a compromise: the baptism would be allowed if Mrs. Morreale would privately drop her support for Baird. She refused, because "it felt somehow like a bribe." Boston's archbishop, Humberto Cardinal Medeiros, told a TV newsman that no priest in the archdiocese would baptize the child unless Mrs. Morreale backed down. Baird countered with a dramatic nationwide call for a volunteer to perform the baptism...
Episcopal women have been moving up toward priestly rank since 1970, when the church first allowed them to become full-fledged deacons: members of the lower clergy authorized to perform baptism, marriages and other liturgical acts, but not to consecrate the Eucharist or pronounce absolution of sins, which only priests can do. There are now some 120 women deacons...