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cahnMore diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!
January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!
January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!
Cunegonde's Kidnapping - Background
Date: 2022-08-31 02:15 pm (UTC)The object of Cunegonde's kidnapping attempt was her baby nephew, who had just been born and was in a church being baptized. To understand how a baby's baptism inspired a kidnapping attempt, I'm going to start with some sociological background.
Background
It's 1762. The kidnapping takes place in Vaals, a Dutch village on the border, just across from, and within easy walking distance of, Aachen. Vaals is Calvinist with a Catholic minority. Aachen is Catholic with a Calvinist minority.
The fact that the Holy Roman Empire is made up of a gazillion tiny principalities is highly relevant. Thanks to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, each principality gets to determine what the official religion is, and has to tolerate the existence of minorities, but not necessarily grant them full civil rights or the right to practice their religion. Freedom of conscience is all you get if you're a minority.
But! Because these principalities are tiny, it's easy to practice "Auslaufen": walking out to go practice your religion in a neighboring principality where your coreligionists are in the majority. You may not be able to have a church in your own land, but there's a good chance you can walk to one (weather, health, etc. permitting).
This setup creates a weird dichotomy: odds are you live surrounded by people who agree with you on matters of religion, and you get a strong in-group and echo chamber effect, but you also have to interact a lot with your walking-distance neighbors of the other religion. You may be a Protestant living in a Protestant principality and earning your daily bread in a Catholic principality, or a Protestant living in a Catholic principality, but earning your daily bread and visiting church in a Protestant principality. The priest in our story lived in a church that straddled the Vaals/Aachen border: it's entrance was on the Protestant side but much of it was on the Catholic side, and the Protestant authorities, as our author says, were not pleased to find that he could escape their jurisdiction merely by retreating to his bedroom!
This can lead to religious tolerance--your neighbors, coworkers, people who bring their pigs to your market, etc. are of a different religion--but also contribute to friction: plenty of opportunities to clash over principles.
Religious tolerance and the Enlightenment are only sort of a thing (some say only 5% of the population of Europe counts as educated enough to participate in Enlightenment discourse). As Jean Calas and his family found, beating up or killing your neighbors over their religion is still totally a thing.
Mixed marriages were rare, but they happened. Protestant and Catholic clergy disapproved strongly and preached against them: they feared losing members of their faith to the other side. They, and lay people, also believed that religious differences within a family were a recipe for a breakdown of the traditional family structure. You're supposed to obey your church leaders, but also your parents or husband (if you're the wife), and what do you do if those imperatives conflict? And how can you have a harmonious marriage with someone you think is doomed to hell?
And which religion do the children get raised in? This is where there's a lot of conflict. In practice, it can work out any one of a number of ways:
- All the children are baptized in the father's religion, because patriarchy.
- Less often, all the children are baptized in the mother's religion.
- The children are baptized in alternating fashion: the firstborn as a Catholic, the secondborn as a Protestant, etc.
- Each child gets baptized in the religion of the parent of their sex: daughters are whatever their mother is, sons their father.
The last one was pretty popular, since it reinforced gender roles. Sons are supposed to grow up to be like Dad and daughters like Mom anyway; making religion align with that expectation reduces conflict. Plus it keeps the 50-50 balance, so neither side feels like the other is winning.
Note that by this date, both Catholics and Protestants recognize each other's baptisms as valid. There's no question of anyone going to hell or limbo just because they were baptized in the wrong church. So there *shouldn't* be anything here to get super worked up about.
Plus, in theory, you can always convert once you get old enough. But this is frowned upon by laypeople. There's an ethos that baptism is an initiation rite, that once you've been baptized, you've joined a community of believers, and that this makes converting to another religion a transgression. This is another attitude that the clergy fervently preaches against, because of course they want converts!
But the fact is, once you've been raised a certain way and attended a certain church, your chances of sticking with that are pretty high. So some people get pretty invested in which religion a baby is baptized in.
And that's where our mixed marriage couple comes in.
Re: Cunegonde's Kidnapping - Background
Date: 2022-09-02 05:06 am (UTC)On the other hand... my church doesn't recognize ANYONE else's baptism, and although I was told by the pastor of D's church at the time that they would recognize my Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints baptism, I suspect he may have been a bit of an anomaly. (I can see the logic both ways.)
But... the nice thing is that D's church does baby baptism, and mine baptizes at age 8, and since neither church is that excited about recognizing the other's baptism we have just had the kids get baptized twice (with their consent at my church, to the extent that an 8-year-old can consent), and we alternate which church they go to.
But it would have been a big deal if we could only have picked one, I actually do get that :) (Even though neither of us believes that anyone is going to hell or limbo because of being baptized in the wrong church.) *shrug* Brains can be weird, what can I say.
Re: Cunegonde's Kidnapping - Background
Date: 2022-09-03 12:56 pm (UTC)This one was for you!
(My church comes out strongly (for a contemporary church) against mixed marriages, although not of course strongly compared to these guys.)
What, no one was brutally murdered while going about their own business? ;)
we have just had the kids get baptized twice
Oh, this is interesting! Check this out:
As early as 1439, Pope Eugene IV had acknowledged the grace-giving efficacy of any baptism, more or less, that used water and invoked the Trinity, so long as the sacrament was performed with the correct intent. In the sixteenth century, when the breakup of western Christendom gave the issue great urgency, the Catholic Council of Trent had reaffirmed this position. Both Catholic and mainstream Protestant leaders were leery of anything that resembled rebaptism, a practice they associated with Anabaptist radicals. Rome therefore discouraged the inclination of priests in some parts of Europe, including the Habsburg Netherlands, to perform conditional baptisms (in which a priest would intone, “If you are baptized, I do not baptize you, but if you have not yet been baptized, I baptize you”) if they had any doubt of the validity of a person’s prior baptism. Conditional baptisms were not approved or practiced after the 1620s in the provinces of the Dutch Republic, nor were they in the diocese of Liège, where our story takes place. To be sure, the Catholic rite included elements, most notably the exorcism of demons, which many Protestant ones omitted. If a Protestant converted to Catholicism, these elements might be performed in a supplemental ceremony. This was not the general custom, though, in the Liège diocese, precisely for the reason, as a pastoral handbook explained, “lest the uneducated common folk think that we deem their [the Protestants’] baptism invalid, and that it is necessary to baptize them again for a second time.”
I thought the conditional baptism was really interesting.
Okay, while I'm here, question about LDS baptism. This is something I heard by word of mouth as a kid and I have no idea if it's true: I was told the whole indexing baptismal records that the church encourages members to do is so all these recorded people can be given a proper, i.e. LDS, baptism. I was told that your church was the only church that could baptize people who weren't present or even living, that they just have to know that the person being baptized existed, and that said church is on a quest to baptize as many people in the history of the world as possible. But that doesn't seem to jive with what you said just now about consent, and is the kind of thing that could easily be a conspiracy theory invented by a different church. So I'm curious!
On a related note, you with your expanded access to FamilySearch owe me some Frederician (boyfriend) lookups! When would be a good time of the year for you?
ETA: I meant to say, I like Anna in all this. She comes off pretty well with her, "Why shouldn't I take babies to the Reformed church? I can understand what they're saying, and it's not evil!"
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints stuff
Date: 2022-09-08 05:39 am (UTC)I was told the whole indexing baptismal records that the church encourages members to do is so all these recorded people can be given a proper, i.e. LDS, baptism.
This is true!
I was told that your church was the only church that could baptize people who weren't present or even living,
This is only half true, it is specifically baptism for the dead (motivated by 1 Corinthians 15:29 KJV: Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?). It's possible they tried doing it for live people who weren't around at some point in Church history, it sounds like the sort of thing someone would try at some point, but I am not motivated enough to search for it and I think it's not all that likely since it's not even kind of Biblically motivated.
that they just have to know that the person being baptized existed,
Yes, this is true.
and that said church is on a quest to baptize as many people in the history of the world as possible.
Yes, true, because you have to be baptized to be saved, and how unfair is it that all these people died without baptism and didn't have the opportunity! (I gotta hand it to my church's theology, it really does try to deal with what Joseph Smith saw as unfairness.)
But that doesn't seem to jive with what you said just now about consent
The missing part is that, after the baptism for the dead is performed, the dead person has the choice of whether to accept the baptism or not. That's the consent part.
Of course, there's also the part where you might want to get consent from, oh, the relatives of the people you are baptizing, which historically the Church has not been great about -- for example, getting into a ton of trouble at some point because they were trying to baptize Holocaust victims *facepalm*. Anyway, they don't do that kind of thing anymore, but this is why they're so big on family history. Because if you take your great-x26-grandfather, or whatever, to the temple to get him baptized, it's rather harder to tell you you can't.
On a related note, you with your expanded access to FamilySearch owe me some Frederician (boyfriend) lookups! When would be a good time of the year for you?
Probably January!
Re: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints stuff
Date: 2022-09-18 08:50 pm (UTC)Lol! That makes sense, re rebaptism.
Thank you for all the explanations and filling in some of the gaps in my knowledge! It's one of those topics where I've only picked up scraps by osmosis.
The missing part is that, after the baptism for the dead is performed, the dead person has the choice of whether to accept the baptism or not. That's the consent part.
Ahhh! That solution did not occur to me, thank you.
for example, getting into a ton of trouble at some point because they were trying to baptize Holocaust victims *facepalm*
Yes, see, that's why I was willing to entertain the possibility that this was all a conspiracy theory made up by people who EXTREMELY don't want this baptism!
Probably January!
Excellent! You will be hearing from me then. :D