I'm Starting To Wonder About This Anglican Business

The visitor who follows the Italian press sent me this gem from a blog that seems to be called La Quotidiana. Translation is by Google.

We are honest. If a man becomes "woman" he changes his name, right? And therefore it is necessary to baptize it again [note the criminal misgendering of the pronoun here -- jb] because the old name of baptism has now expired. It's a matter of logic, that's all. This is the beautiful find of the Anglican Church that we could call "baptism of transsexuals".

The Conference of Bishops of the Church of England has promoted an initiative called "affirmation of the baptismal faith". This is not a new baptism, they want to clarify, but it has all the characteristics to seem such. In fact during this ceremony the Church of England blesses the new life and a new name is imposed on the transsexual. Then this sexual renaissance is sucked through the sprinkling of the head of the "baptized" with water and blessed oils, reciting some verses of the Book of Psalms and signing a veritable baptism certificate.

The clumsiness of Google's rendering here, I suspect, reflects ironies in the original. Further,

"Rebirth" is the key word to understand this carnival blasphemous. According to Catholic doctrine baptism allows us to be reborn in Christ because before, because of original sin, we were dead. In the Anglican version, rebirth involves sexual identity. The discomfort of living in a body that does not feel its own can be assimilated to the feeling of dying by leading an existence into a certain sexual identity. The rebirth happens in the exchange of sex. Therefore it seems reasonable to bless this rebirth even in the church. And it seems obligatory to conclude that this second "baptism" is worth more than the first, since the first baptism had been done on a creature that had not even begun its caterpillar-to-butterfly journey.

It is then to be noted that this para-baptism overturns exactly the meaning of authentic baptism. In fact, he hinges the person into sin even more. If after baptism we must do everything to remain immaculate, trans baptism, blessing sexual rectification, blesses sin, because it qualifies as right to throw into the bin that identity intended for us by God in order to replace it with another invented by we. A clear rejection of the natural laws desired by the Creator.

Those who've been following this blog recognize that there's something quintessentially Anglican about this. The problem I have is why liberals like Bernard Law or Francesco Coccopalmerio should want to bring Anglicanism into the Church in a formal and unique way, rather than to accept individual ex-Anglicans as converts to the faith in the same way that any other non-Catholics come in. Perhaps it's the appeal of all the weasel-worded ambiguity that we see here in the justifications of sorta-kinda rebaptism, for instance.

I think the characterization of Anglicanorum coetibus as some sort of generous gesture by Pope Benedict ought to be subject to reinterpretation. Yet again, my instinct is not to go anywhere near an ordinariate parish -- I'd sooner visit old friends at St Thomas Episcopal Hollywood knowing what I was doing, rather than step into an ordinariate parish with nothing like that clarity.

Demons exist. Playing footsie with demons is dangerous indeed.