Word: baptisme
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...Infant baptism is under fire. The most recent attack on this traditional Christian practice comes from West Germany, where 350 Evangelical (Lutheran) churchmen have petitioned the Rhineland synod to abandon the rubric requiring infant baptism and let parents decide when their children should undergo the ceremony. To give the demand more weight, 50 pastors in Germany have publicly indicated that they will not baptize their own children...
Some of the protesters merely object to the abuses of infant baptism, but oth ers go much farther, saying that baptism is only meaningful when the in dividual involved understands the significance of the ritual-a viewpoint that has lately been adopted by a number of other Protestant and even Catholic thinkers. In the Roman Catholic Church -which requires parents to have their children baptized as soon as possible-several progressive theologians have seriously suggested that the ceremony be postponed until puberty, when a youth presumably is mature enough to accept or reject his faith. Perhaps the most formidable challenge...
Limbo-Bound. Error or not, infant baptism has its roots in antiquity. St. Irenaeus in the 2nd century referred to the practice, and it apparently had become the norm of the Church by the year 400. St. Augustine articulated the gloomy theology of baptism that was to remain current in the Church for nearly 1,000 years: that the ritual was necessary to cleanse an individual of the stain of original sin, and that the unbaptized were doomed to hell. Somewhat more merciful in his thinking, Thomas Aquinas later suggested that the unbaptized would go not to hell...
...modern challenge to infant baptism stems from several different arguments. A growing number of Roman Catholic thinkers now look on original sin as the universal weakness of man rather than a damning individual fault-which cuts the ground out completely from the need for infant baptism. Still others object to the "magical" implications of the baptism ceremony-namely, that a spiritual cleansing is achieved by the physical act of pouring a few drops of water on the infant's head. Many clerics argue that baptism has in effect been made a mockery by unchurched parents who want their child...
Gaudi's acknowledged chef-d'oeuvre is the Church of the Sagrada Familia, still abuilding at snail's pace in Barcelona. But many of the revolutionary structural concepts he employed there, including columns shaped like so many free-form caryatids, received their baptism in the crypt of smaller Guell colony chapel, built on the city's outskirts. Says the American architect, Peter Harnden, who has been hired by Barcelona's Society of the Friends of Gaudi to help restore the building to Gaudi's original design: "It is a continuing surprise and delight...