Another diocese is admitting that a church official had used the wrong word during a baptism, invalidating the religious rites performed for decades.
The discovery was made by a fellow priest when he watched a video of himself being baptized as a child, The Associated Press reported.
Rev. Matthew Hood had been watching a video of his own ceremony recorded in a suburban Detroit church in 1990.
He heard the priest who performed the rite say “We baptize” instead of the required “I baptize.”
Deacon Mark Springer is now retired from St. Anastasia Church in Troy, Michigan, but while he served the church from 1986 to 1999, he performed almost 800 baptisms. The Vatican, however, decreed in June 2020 that the ceremony must say “I baptize” and that anything different means the blessings are invalid, the AP reported. Baptisms performed by Springer were presumed invalid since the Archdiocese of Detroit said wasn’t clear whether Springer said “we” or “I.”
Hood said that one mistake invalidated any other sacrament he took over the years, even becoming a priest.
Hood was rebaptized and was given other sacraments and was ordained again in 2020 to correct the mistake.
But the pronoun mistake that invalidated Hood’s priesthood well before he had even considered becoming a priest had further consequences, the AP reported.
>>Previous coverage: Priest resigns after learning he has performed baptisms wrongly for 20 years
Hood had performed about 30 marriages in the early years as a priest and all those couples had to make their vows again because of the mistake in 1990.
“I was expecting them to be angry, upset, confused,” Hood said. “Their reaction was ‘Father Matt, we feel so bad for you.’”
The Archdiocese of Detroit says hundreds of members of the church were baptized by Springer.
But many of them haven’t had the religious ceremony redone. The diocese is now looking for those who may not be baptized in the eyes of the Catholic Church because of the mistake.
The church found that about 200 baptisms were valid. Another 71 people have had the baptism and other sacraments redone, with another 47 making arrangements to have their rites repeated. But the diocese’s spokeswoman, Holly Fournier, told the AP there are still 455 people who have not yet responded and 10 who have turned down the opportunity.
Some of the faithful who had been contacted are not happy that the one-word mistake would invalidate their religious legacy.
“Why do you think so many people are leaving the Catholic Church?” a woman, who wasn’t identified, said during a 2020 question-and-answer session with clergy that’s posted online. “This is a great example why. This is just awful.”
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