Baptism and “a right to be forgotten”?

Can the “right to be forgotten” require the Church to forget that somebody was baptised? That question is now before the European Court of Justice and it is actually a lot more interesting than it might initially sound. 

The case concerns a man baptised as a child in Belgium who later decided that he no longer wished to belong to the Catholic Church. He asked for his name to be removed from the baptismal register. The Diocese of Ghent refused to delete the record but offered instead to annotate it, recording his decision to leave the Church. The dispute eventually reached the Belgian courts and has now arrived before the EU's highest court, where Advocate General Tamara Ćapeta has argued that the Church should not enjoy a general exemption from the GDPR requirement to erase personal data simply because the information appears in a baptismal register. Before reaching instinctively for the Catholic answer, I think we should acknowledge that there is a serious privacy argument here.

Imagine being baptised as a baby without having chosen it, growing into adulthood, rejecting Christianity completely and formally telling the Church that you no longer wish to be associated with it. You might reasonably object if an institution continued to describe you as one of its members. You might also ask why an organisation with which you no longer identify should possess a permanent record connecting your name with a religious affiliation you explicitly reject. In this day and age, personal data can be aggregated, transferred and processed on an enormous scale, the principle that individuals should possess meaningful control over information held about them is not trivial.

I also think that Churches should not expect an exemption from every legitimate protection of privacy merely because their records have a religious purpose. But bear with me here, baptismal registers create an unusual problem because they are not simply membership databases. A baptismal record makes an historical claim. It records that, on a particular date and in a particular place, a particular person was baptised, usually identifying parents, godparents and the minister as well.

Deleting the entry therefore does something rather different from removing somebody from a mailing list or cancelling a gym membership. It alters the surviving institutional record of an event which actually happened. That distinction becomes even more important in Catholic theology. The Church does not believe baptism is merely an enrolment procedure by which somebody joins an organisation until deciding to resign from it. Baptism is a sacrament which, if validly received, cannot be repeated or undone. Catholic theology traditionally describes it as imparting an indelible sacramental character.

That does NOT mean the Church is entitled to pretend somebody remains a practising Catholic when they have explicitly rejected the faith. Those are two different claims. “The Church says I remain sacramentally baptised” is a theological statement about what Catholics believe happened at baptism. “The Church claims I remain a practising member” is a sociological statement about my present beliefs and affiliation.

The first may remain true within Catholic sacramental theology even when the second is manifestly false. And that is why annotation seems to me such an important middle course. If somebody tells the Church that he no longer identifies as Catholic, the record should be capable of stating that clearly. Such an annotation respects something morally important: a human being has the right to say what he now believes and to reject an affiliation he no longer accepts.

The Church should not count him as attending Mass, present him as a practising Catholic, contact him as though nothing has changed or use a childhood baptism to disregard his adult repudiation of the faith. But acknowledging what somebody believes today does not require pretending that something which happened yesterday did not happen. Indeed, the principle extends beyond religion. Archives constantly contain information which the people concerned might no longer wish to define them. Someone may leave a political party, renounce citizenship, dissolve a marriage, abandon an organisation or repudiate convictions sincerely held decades earlier. The historical record can acknowledge the change precisely because it preserves both realities: what was true then and what is true now.

There are legitimate questions about access, data security and how information in sacramental registers may be processed. Institutional memory cannot become an excuse for unlimited retention or exploitation of personal information. But deletion is different. A society which takes personal autonomy seriously should allow people to change their beliefs, affiliations and identities. A society which takes history seriously should also understand that changing what we believe now does not make events in our past cease to have occurred. Perhaps the solution is therefore neither to tell the former Catholic, “You cannot leave,” nor to tell the Church, “You must forget.”

Record the baptism.

Record the departure.

Respect the person's present convictions.

And preserve the truth about the past.

Source: Mark Lambert @sitsio

 comece.eu/comece-reacts-…

Europe is Burning

N.B. What Will rose from the ashes is an extension of the third world. There may be a few museums staffed by Muslims, as you find in Turkey.

@bebo919 nails it here:

“For those surprised by what’s happening in France, the surprise is the strange part.

“A policewoman is beaten in the street. A high school is burned by young men born in the country. Palestinian slogans go up on French walls. The president goes to the United Nations to talk about someone else. None of this is a mystery. When you import the Third World, you become the Third World. There are no exceptions.

“Climate does not make a culture. Museums do not make a culture. People do. Replace Europeans with people from Africa and the Islamic world and you do not get a more colorful France. You get their culture, on French ground, with French papers.

“Muslims, as a civilization, do not assimilate into a European nation. They already have one. It is the ummah, and it outranks the passport. A boy born in France who burns a French school under a foreign flag has answered the integration question. It is the ideology. Europeans treated a doctrine as a social-work problem, lost the demographics, and are now losing the street.

“They are not losing it alone. The Marxist left and the liberals are carrying the Islamists to the gate, exactly as the Iranian left carried Khomeini in 1979. They hated the old order more than they feared the new one. They called the alliance progress, anti-imperialism, and solidarity. When the Islamists took power, the alliance ended. 

“The left was hanged from the cranes and the lamp posts, the liberals were cleared out, and the revolution kept only the believers. Europe is running that partnership again. The left thinks it is using Islam against the West. Islam is using the left against the West. The lamp posts come after the ballot box.

“The next decade is not hard to sketch. As the capitals tip, those who can leave will leave. Think of South Africa: a European-built country, a demographic replacement, a ballot box that ratified the new majority, and an afterward of violence, emigration, and a state that no longer belonged to the people who built it. Europe is running the same film with a religious script added.

Remigration is the honest remedy, and past a point a democracy will not administer it. Once the new population wins the ballot box, it will not vote itself out. The window closes with the census. After that, a shrinking native population lives under rules it did not write. Some will be killed. More will be pressed into a second-class peace, the old condition of non-Muslims under Islamic rule. Convert, pay the jizya, or be killed. You may remain. You may not rule.

This does not stop at Europe. Populations change alliances. France and Britain hold nuclear weapons and submarine fleets. The warheads do not change politics when the electorate does. They change owners. America is not a spectator. A Europe that is no longer European is not an ally. It is a near shore with Western hardware and a different civilization.

“Western Europe let the cancer in. It has metastasized. I do not see a cure the patient will accept in time. For Europeans who intend to remain Europeans, the answer is Noah’s, not Brussels’. Run, while running is allowed, and build where the infection has not taken. Parts of Eastern Europe are the ark. The West that existed as a people, not a museum, is not coming back by seminar.

“There are no miracles in demography. There is only a majority, and whether anyone left in time to be a people somewhere else.”

He tweeted a video of Muslims burning down a French school. Their own school they didn’t pay for …

NY Times promoting fake “doctor” in Michigan race

Every time he’s mentioned the NY Times uses the title “Doctor” in front of El-Sayed’s name. He’s not a licensed physician. 

Politico:

Michigan Senate hopeful El-Sayed calls himself a ‘physician’ but has little history treating patients

It’s a weird thing to hang your hat on in terms of a biographical detail if you never actually practiced medicine,” one Dem operative said.

Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed speaks during an event at Mumford High School in Detroit, on May 3, 2026.| Sarah Rice/Getty Images

By  ADAM WREN and  DANIEL LIPPMAN

05/12/2026 3:12 PM EDT |Updated: 05/12/2026 4:04 PM EDT

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for years has publicly said he’s a physician — but there’s overwhelming evidence that he’s had no experience as a licensed medical doctor.

This April, he gave an interview to a local TV journalist where he talked up his credentials as a physician multiple times. In March, he told a group of Teamsters nurses that he had “been in enough codes to watch who really does the work” and said that same month on a podcast that “I’ve been a doctor my whole career.”

His LinkedIn profile currently says he’s a “physician,” and late last month he called himself“a physician and epidemiologist” at a Council of Baptist Pastors debate in Detroit.

But according to a review of Michigan and New York state medical records, he’s never been granted a medical license in those states. El-Sayed’s hands-on experience treating patients appears to be a short clinical rotation called a sub-internship at a small hospital in Manhattan for four weeks at the end of medical school, he told a podcast in 2022, where he said his “job was to be the, like, worst doctor on the team” and he was “cosplaying a doctor.”

“The perception in Michigan is that he is, at least at one point in his life, a licensed physician,” said Chris Dewitt, an unaligned Democratic strategist based in Michigan. “That apparently is not the case, and it blows up a big part of his campaign.”

There’s no doubt that El-Sayed has top-notch medical credentials. He attended the University of Michigan Medical School and ended up receiving his medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He has a doctorate in public health from Oxford University and worked as an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia for a year before moving to Detroit to be executive director and health officer of the Detroit Health Department.

“He has earned the right to be called ‘doctor’ twice over,” El-Sayed spokesperson Roxie Richner said in a statement. Richner didn’t respond to questions about his use of the word “physician.” El-Sayed has said in the past that he decided not to practice medicine after treating a patient during medical school and decided he wanted to address systemic issues, instead of individual patients.

But his history of suggesting to voters that he served as a practicing physician — with examples stretching back almost a decade — has muddled his personal history, adding confusion to his otherwise impressive achievements. In 2018, when El-Sayed was running for governor of Michigan, Crain’s Detroit Business published a story that also examined his claims of being a physician but not having a license to practice medicine in Michigan.

“I think there’s a lot of ways that one serves as a physician. And I think the work that I have done and I continue to do is true to the core and the ethos of medicine,” El-Sayed told Crain’s Detroit Business at the time. “And when I took my Hippocratic Oath, that is still an oath that I use to guide my work today. I’m a physician because I have an MD, but I’m also a physician because of the work that I’ve dedicated my career to.”

The state of Michigan prohibits anyone who is not licensed “to induce the belief” that they have a license or are registered to practice medicine.

El-Sayed has made his medical credentials a key part of his appeal on this campaign, often highlighting his background in medicine and as a physician — or not correcting people when they mention it. When Sen. Bernie Sanders appeared with El-Sayed last year at a Medicare town hall, the Vermont independent stopped to remind the livestreamed audience why he was backing El-Sayed: “there are no people in the Democratic caucus who are physicians,” he said. Abdul sat silently by and didn’t correct him.

To some in Michigan’s political establishment, his claims are misleading.

“It’s a weird thing to hang your hat on in terms of a biographical detail if you never actually practiced medicine,” said Adrian Hemond, a Democrat who is CEO of Lansing-based political consulting firm Grassroots Midwest.

“It’s not as though he hasn’t done anything with all of the fancy education that he got like running public health programming for Wayne County and for the city of Detroit. And so maybe you would lean into that, as opposed to giving people the impression that you may have practiced medicine before,” Hemond said.

More: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/12/abdul-el-sayed-doctor-physician-00916389

BREAKING: TLMs worldwide increase by 255 since Traditionis custodes

 @TLMRyan (Twitter) on YouTube @PreConciliarRadio:

Latin Mass Growth Has Exploded Despite Vatican Wishes

Video: https://youtu.be/e9LwZ_pBx1U

Cardinal Eijk condemns euthanasia of Dutch toddler

Dutch officials say doctors did the right thing in killing a disabled 1-year-old child, but Cardinal Willem Eijk argues euthanasia can never be justified.

Cardinal Eijk receives the biretta from Pope Benedict XVI in Saint Peter's Basilica on February 18, 2012, in Vatican CityFranco Origlia/Getty Images

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Matt Lamb

Wed Sep 30, 2026 - 9:32 am EDT

(LifeSiteNews) — The killing of a 1-year-old Dutch child through euthanasia is a “fundamental violation” of the toddler’s dignity, Cardinal William Eijk of the Netherlands said recently.

Controversy has grown in the past several weeks after further details emerged on the murder of an almost two-year-old boy in the Netherlands. Though the killing occurred last year, Dutch authorities only recently released their review of the matter, sparking renewed interest. The euthanasia occurred just one year after the Netherlands expanded its assisted suicide regime.

The child, nearly 2 years old, had been born at 26 weeks’ gestation. He had severe brain damage, cerebral palsy, seizures, and a developmental age of about six weeks. Although the child was not dying, doctors and parents chose to sedate and kill him, as LifeSiteNews first covered in June.

The report argues that the child “had multiple, very severe disabilities, both mental and physical, and the prognosis was that the child would be dependent on support with all activities of daily living for the rest of their life,” with a “very high probability of the child dying at a very young age due to complications.”

“In the course of the child’s short life, there was a complete lack of development or improvement,” the report claims, with parents and physicians “convinced that the child was suffering unbearably and without prospect of improvement.”

Some doctors objected to the killing, so the child’s parents simply found other doctors who supported euthanasia and endorsed their plan.

But killing disabled children is not compassionate, Cardinal Eijk told Crux during a recent interview.

“The word ‘merciful’ is often used nowadays to justify ethically questionable actions. However, is it merciful to violate the fundamental dignity of the human person by ending their life,” he asked.

Euthanasia violates the dignity of the human body, Eijk said.

“Objectively speaking, however, a human being is not merely his body, nor is he merely his soul, but both soul and body,” he said. “The body is an essential part of the human person. The termination of his body is therefore a fundamental violation of his inherent dignity.”

More: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/cardinal-eijk-condemns-euthanasia-of-dutch-toddler/?utm_source=SOCIAL&fbclid=IwdGRjcAUruoZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBwZG9mBWZkaWQWUPcjcj35A4eNr6Mti_TL_SMb5t_uCXNydGMGYXBwX2lkCjY2Mjg1NjgzNzkAAR5x3FpQFgmMxwLjc7Pb6wFt9Ue4rghrVY0BbTnNfuFf6SmF0C81xiBO9Ma30g_aem_VT9rovgAatnv7WdCIvhcVg

Archbishop Randazzo’s Warbjng

Archbishop Randazzo warns against using synodality to discard Church tradition

THOMAS EDWARDS

SEP. 29, 2026

The Vatican’s new legislative prefect has warned against interpretations of synodality that treat the present moment as an opportunity to cut away elements of the Church’s existing life

The prefect for legislative texts has warned against interpretations of synodality that treat the current period as an opportunity to discard elements of the Church’s existing life.

In his first substantial interview since Pope Leo XIV appointed him Prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Legislative Texts, Archbishop Randazzo told the online canon law journal Vox Canonica this month that some approaches to synodality risk failing to recognise the continuity of the Church’s existing canonical and ecclesial tradition.

“Some over-enthusiastic interpretations of synodality may view this moment as an opportunity simply to cut away what is perceived to be dead wood,” His Excellency said.

The Archbishop used the image of an ancient tree to explain his understanding of the present period in the Church. “In this season, the old wood can put forth new green shoots; the tree does not cease to be what it is, but rather it blossoms anew and bears abundant fruit,” His Grace said.

Archbishop Randazzo said that synodality and accompaniment should not be regarded as inventions of the contemporary Church. “Synodality and accompaniment are not new realities,” His Excellency said. “They are contemporary expressions that seek to help the Church ‘scrutinise the signs of the times and interpret them in the light of the Gospel’.”

“Although the vocabulary is new, the underlying ecclesial reality is already embodied in the Church’s life and canonical tradition,” he added. He pointed to both the Latin Code of Canon Law and the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, saying they contain “numerous examples of ecclesial life, mission, and ministry that are authentically synodal and that necessarily require accompaniment”

More: https://x.com/sitsio/status/2104968188098146812?s=46&t=IydJ-X8H6c0NM044nYKQ0w

Fr. Fessio’s “Reasons Against Women Acolytes and Lectors”

Preface

Fr. Joseph Fessio, SJ, is a man who needs no introduction. Most famous for being the founder of Ignatius Press, he played an important role at the 1987 Synod of Bishops that few Catholics today are aware of. He was one of twenty experts appointed to that synod by Pope John Paul II, which discussed lay ministries among other topics, and which led to that pope’s apostolic exhortation Christifideles Laici, in which he famously criticized the “clericalization of the laity.”

In a paper distributed to the participants, Fr. Fessio presented in broad outlines the case against female laity being admitted to liturgical ministries such as acolyte and lector. This text seems to have been published in Origins 17/32 (January 21, 1988), but I discovered it in the fairly obscure newsletter of the St. Joseph Foundation, which is where the text I have scanned and reproduced below came from. At the time, Fr. Fessio was a member of the Foundation’s National Advisory Committee.

While Fr. Fessio’s arguments are sound and strong, and apparently persuasive enough to have caused the synod to waver on the question, he and those who took the traditional stance lost the battle. Infamously, John Paul II would cave on female altar servers (as Paul VI had already caved on women as substitute readers), and Francis would introduce a further rupture by legislating that women can be “instituted” acolytes and lectors. Such nonsense has nothing to do with the traditional Minor Orders and Subdiaconate, which are part of the Church’s immemorial tradition and still remain in use today in traditional institutes of apostolic life and religious communities. My book Ministers of Christis dedicated to the explication and defense of these lower Orders as well as the refutation of the feminist novelties.

Without further ado, here is Fr. Fessio’s superb intervention from 1987. May it be read far and wide. —PAK

I. Introduction

In the discussions of the possible admission of women to the stable non-ordained ministries of acolyte and lector and also of the admission of women to the function of acolyte as altar servers, the impression has often been given that the main or only reasons against such admission are of a cultural, pastoral or psychological nature. In particular, some have said there seem to be no intrinsic reasons of a doctrinal or theological character against such admission.

The purpose of this brief expose is simply to outline some of the major philosophical and theological elements which many theologians consider relevant to this issue. There is, of course, an a priori presumption in favor of the existence of such theological arguments, since it is unlikely that a consistent 2,000-year tradition of the Catholic Church across many ages and cultures would be based on merely contingent or culturally conditioned foundations. The intent of this expose is neither to be complete and detailed nor persuasive in its argumentation. This would require much greater scope that the brief outline of relevant philosophical and theological elements presented here. Moreover, the limitation to such elements is not meant to neglect or deny the very many weighty arguments which can be brought to bear from the cultural, pastoral and psychological perspectives. But the intent is to indicate that what may appear to be merely a matter of ecclesiastical discipline in fact involves principles derived from philosophical anthropology, Trinitarian doctrine, Christology, and ecclesiology.

More: https://www.traditionsanity.com/p/fr-fessios-reasons-against-women?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web