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Comment by Jakob | Hacker News Reader

My partner and I are from two different European countries that speak different languages.

When we wanted to marry in the country of my partner, both our (catholic) churches needed to sync. They did so in their common language: Latin.

That was a fun surprise.

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My spouse and I lived in London, but we both come from (other) European countries, so for our wedding, three countries and four languages were involved: the church's forms are all both in the local language as well as in Latin.

This is no different than hundreds of years ago, and it works well. Thanks to Latin, the church's _lingua franca_.

I once heard someone say "English has replaced Latin as the Lingua Franca," and started giggling incoherently.

there is probably a joke about Jean-Luc Picard speaking proper King's English

That’s pretty cool. What kind of things were your respective churches communicating about?

Assuming they're Roman Catholic, to get married in the Church at least one of the couple needs to be Catholic and records of their baptism, confirmation, etc. would be shared between the individual's church and wherever they're getting married. You also run into this if you move around a lot, not just for marriage. If you want to be confirmed, you need to be baptised. Your baptismal records may be in another state or country and would need to be shared with your confirmation church.

In fact, the baptismal parish is the official keeper of your sacramental records, so when you’re married, the marriage is communicated to that parish and added to your sacramental record (likewise for confirmation if it doesn’t happen at your baptismal church, and, less commonly ordination will also be communicated there). When parishes are closed or consolidated, the bishop will indicate what parish becomes the new keeper of sacramental records for the closed parish.¹

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1. This is one of two significant cases that impact some of the two-church parishes that are part of the last decade of reorganization in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Sacramental records will be kept at only one of the churches. The other situation reflects Holy Thursday and Easter Vigil Masses. A parish is only allowed to have one Mass on Holy Thursday and on Easter Vigil, so the two-church parishes will only celebrate at one of the churches even if they had sufficient clergy to have those Masses at both locations.

When my mother retired, she volunteered at the local church to transcribe and prepare 100 years of sacramental records to prepare them for digitization by the archdiocese. There were records in filing cabinets in offices, some in chests stored in the basement of the church, some with water damage.

The Catholic Church keeps pretty good records, for the most part. In New England, Quebec, and maritime Canada, many people can trace their ancestry back to at least the 1500s based on these records.

> baptismal parish is the official keeper of your sacramental records

Interesting fact that I (as a Catholic) was not aware of, though I've observed it happening in practice when preparing to marry my wife, who did get all the relevant records from her home parish in a different part of Austria from where we were living at the time.

I'm curious about two things though, if you happen to know them: first is this "offical keeper" thing a Church-wide policy in all countries, not just a de facto tradition in some, and if so is it stated anywhere e.g. in Canon law as a universal practice? Secondly, how does the policy apply to those who were baptized in a non-Catholic church and later converted? Obviously an Anglican (or whatever) parish isn't going to take on the duty of being the official record-keeper for any Catholic sacramental requirements.

For a long time this was a common concept: that more central authorities should only come in where more local cannot effectively do it (subsidiarity). This was of course pretty universal until recently. The oldest counter-example I can think of is the French Revolution that started to centralise.

The church works like DNS in that regard. (Without the caching. ;)

While it was always decentralised, the standardisation of the documents was with the Council of Trent ~1550 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Trent

It is a universal practice.

For those baptized in a different church but received into the Catholic church, they will go through a ceremony at the Easter Vigil Mass (where they will typically receive confirmation and first communion) and that church will be their official keeper of records. They will have a copy of whatever proof of baptism the person had. In rare cases where a person was baptized, but there is absolutely no written record (things like an inscription in a family Bible count as written record), they will receive conditional baptism where the person doing the baptism (usually a priest, but not necessarily) will preface the words of the baptism with the phrase, “if you are able to be baptized.” This was the normative practice for those baptized outside the Catholic church before Vatican II. As mentioned in a sibling comment, the baptismal and sacramental records of the church are a key source of genealogical data for many researchers.

Solution: Latin block chain

Basically- are you baptized and are you not married.

similar experience led me to start learning Latin: once travelled to an other country within Europe and the priest in the companion asked directions from a local in Latin.

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