Erase baptismal record, Spanish court tells Valencia archdiocese
A Spanish court has ordered Catholic officials in Valencia to remove a man’s name from Church baptismal records.
Manuel Blat Gonzalez, a homosexual man who objected to the Church’s campaign against same-sex marriage, had demanded that the Church erase the record of his baptism 40 years ago. The Valencia archdiocese refused, explaining that baptism cannot be reversed and the record is a historical document.
The Data Protection Agency, a government body charged with preserving individual privacy, took up the Blat case and won a court ruling that required the Church to discard sacramental records of those who made the request. The Valencia archdiocese appealed, but the appeal has now been rejected. Catholic World News
5 comments:
You are one busy blogger lately. Good posts Mr. Marshall!
Nice 1984 reference as well. Blogging hard and pulling out the culture references. Nice.
And oh, by the way, how does this fit into Valencian/Spanish notions of the separation of Church and state?
Thanks Father
You're the "one percent" that I guessed might catch the reference to Orwell and 1984.
I suppose the sales of that book declined precipitously after 1985.
For those that haven't read it, here is a quick synopsis of Winston Smith's job:
The populace of Oceania, belonging to three classes—Inner Party members, Outer Party members and members of a lower-class proletariat ("the Proles")—is subordinate to ruthless government control. This is accomplished and regulated by a "Ministry of Truth" in which the protagonist, Winston Smith works as an Outer Party member. Smith spends his days constantly rewriting and altering history to satisfy the government (which includes destroying all evidence of how history has actually happened)—amending newspaper articles of the past so to remove all reference to individuals who the state has identified as "unpersons" (people who the state declares as having never existed).
Father:
And with respect to the current Spanish government's political philosophies that seems contradictory, they also come from 1984:
The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
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