Papal approbation being no bad thing, I was delighted to learn that Pope Francis, in a homily a few weeks ago, had suggested that his congregants learn the date of their baptisms and celebrate it—which is precisely what I have been proposing to audiences around the country this past year, when discussing my book, Evangelical Catholicism.
I usually begin by confessing that marking and honoring the date of my baptism hadn’t really occurred to me until a quarter-century or so ago, when I began working with evangelical Protestants on pro-life and religious freedom issues and noted that some of them had an interesting way of introducing themselves at a meeting. Whereas the normal American way of breaking-the-ice is to say, “I’m John Doe and I work at Boeing” or “I’m Jane Smith and I’m an attorney,” these folks would begin rather differently: “I’m John Doe/Jane Smith and I was born again on such-and-such-a- date,” usually in the past 10 or 15 years. Contrarian that I can be on occasion, when things got around the table to me, I’d say, “I’m George Weigel and I was born again on April 29, 1951… at which point I was 12 days old.”
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