Sins of the Mother

For Carol Morreale, 20, and her husband Daniel, 23, the second Sunday of August was to have been a day of celebration. On that day the couple had planned to take their three-month-old son Nathaniel to Immaculate Conception Church in Marlboro, Mass., for his baptism as a Roman Catholic. Guests were beginning to gather for a gala baptismal party. Then the phone rang: a call from Father John J. Roussin, assistant pastor of the church. Was she the same Carol Morreale who had been quoted in a Marlboro newspaper as supporting the establishment of an abortion-information clinic in the city? She was. In that case, warned the priest, "there might be some problems."

So there were. When the couple arrived at the church, Mrs. Morreale was told that her son would not be baptized unless and until she withdrew her support of the proposed abortion clinic. Roussin and the church's pastor, Monsignor Francis X. Meehan, feared that her views on abortion so seriously contradicted church teachings that the child could not be brought up as a believing Catholic. They may have misunderstood Mrs. Morreale, who says she does not favor abortion herself, only the right of others to choose it. But one church canon does enjoin priests from baptizing an infant unless they are assured that at least one of the parents will raise the child in the Catholic faith,* though the law is seldom so rigidly applied.

What exacerbated the issue for the Morreales was a bitter local battle over abortion in their heavily Catholic (80% of the 30,000 population) town of Marlboro. The antis were lined up solidly behind a proposal to ban abortion clinics in the city. The defenders of the clinics, some of them Catholics like the Morreales, were led by an outsider, Abortion Advocate William Baird of Long Island. After their baby's baptism was halted, the distraught Morreales called Baird for advice, and he flew to Boston eager for a public showdown. Unfortunately, perhaps, the archdiocese of Boston was in a mood to oblige.

Church officials first quietly offered the Morreales a compromise: the baptism would be allowed if Mrs. Morreale would privately drop her support for Baird. She refused, because "it felt somehow like a bribe." Boston's archbishop, Humberto Cardinal Medeiros, told a TV newsman that no priest in the archdiocese would baptize the child unless Mrs. Morreale backed down. Baird countered with a dramatic nationwide call for a volunteer to perform the baptism.

Locked Doors. Last week the Morreales got their volunteer, another controversial outsider: New York Jesuit Priest Joseph F. O'Rourke, 36, an antiwar activist who is now affiliated with Catholics for a Free Choice, a group that disputes the church's teachings on abortion. On the steps of Immaculate Conception Church, whose doors were firmly locked, O'Rourke baptized Nathaniel Ryan Morreale with the ancient formula, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit." Bill Baird, a former Sunday school teacher who now professes "no formal religion," was invited to make a sign of the cross on the child's forehead.

Some Catholics were chagrined by the embarrassing confrontation. Father Charles Curran, a noted moral theologian at the Catholic University of America, observed that "there is going to be more pluralism in Roman Catholicism on particular moral questions. I disagree with the position of abortion on demand, but I can't say that the teaching on abortion is a matter of faith and a reason to refuse baptism."

In any case, both at the Vatican and in Boston, church officials conceded that the baptism, though, "illicit," was a valid Christian baptism. But Monsignor Meehan felt that he had to get in a hard last word. "It seems clear," said Immaculate Conception's pastor, "that the child is not baptized into the ecclesiastical community of faith we call the Roman Catholic Church." That may be one reason why the Morreales, who plan to remain Catholic, are shopping for another parish in which to worship.

* An exception: if the child is in danger of death, any person--even a non-Catholic--may baptize.

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