Now here’s a fascinating story. Catholic man meets Jewish girl. They marry. He converts to please her family. They have a daughter. They divorce. She gets custody. He returns to the practice of Catholicism, and takes the three-year-old daughter to be baptized without his ex-wife’s knowledge. Then a Chicago judge issues a restraining order forbidding the man from exposing his daughter to any religion but Judaism.
This raises so many points, and questions, it’s a blogger’s dream scenario. Here are a few of mine:
- Here is one practical reason why mixed marriages are a bad idea.
- Here is one practical reason why insincere conversions are a bad idea.
- Here is one practical reason why divorce is a bad idea.
- I can’t decide whether the man was truly acting in his child’s spiritual interests, or just trying to stick it to his ex-wife, or just motivated by characteristically (for our age) wacky theology (“Catholicism falls under the umbrella of Judaism”). How can you tell?
- What does it say about the state of our culture, when religion is used by family courts as a point of leverage?
- What does it say about the state of our culture, when judges can baldly restrict a father’s right to give religious instruction to his child? And what does this bode for the future?
- Should a Jewish parent object to her child’s being baptized? Would a Catholic parent object to his child’s undergoing what he believed to be some similarly harmless and empty ritual?
- Did the church in this case fail in due diligence prior to baptizing the girl? If the priest was aware of the court order, should he have refused her the sacrament?