At 10:44 PM +0000 12/28/00, B.M.COOK wrote:
>Holy water is never used to
>> baptise.
>
>??
>In my (admittedly Anglican) experience, the water used for baptism is always
>blessed by the officiating clergyman at the beginning of the service. I have
>always assumed / presumed that this was a general Christian church practice
>that the Church of England had NOT discarded at the reformation.
I have in a secondary source (David Cressy) an assertion that
baptisms by ministers in the Established Church were always performed
with "holy water," since there were disputes over whether sprinkling
holy water over the congregation on Sundays "in remembrance of their
baptism" was permissible as "a moral ceremony" or whether it was too
reminiscent of "Romish ceremonies."
Apparently, though, midwives could baptise with *any* water, so long
as it was pure and clean and didn't have other things mixed in with
it. There is in the same source a quote from 1576 from the oath that
licensed midwives were required to take, which says,
"...that in the ministration of the sacrament of baptism in the
time of necessity, I will use apt and the accustomed words of
the same sacrament, that is to say, these words following or
the like in effect, 'I christen thee in the name of the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Ghost,' and none other profane words.
And that in such time of necessity, in baptizing any infant
born, and pouring water upon the head of the same infant,
I will use pure and clean water, and not any rose or damask
water, or water made of any confection of mixture; and
that I will certify the curate of the parish church of every
such baptizing."
This would seem intended to prevent the making or use of lustral
water, which if I recall correctly has chrism and salt in it (?).
Also, after about 1604, any provision for midwives baptising children
quietly faded out of official English policy -- the possibility was
completely ignored, since the official view was that *all* baptisms
should be performed by an ordained minister, and preferably in
church. However, there are still some emergency baptisms being
performed, some of them by women, as late as 1700, as well as
clandestine Catholic baptisms, baptisms with plain "unblessed" water
by ministers tending toward Puritanism, et cetera. There does seem to
have been quite a lot of variation in practice.
(BTW, I'd like to know what anyone thinks of Cressy's _Birth,
Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life Cycle in Tudor and
Stuart England_.)
|