Eucharisteo:
Assuming a declaration of nullity is issued on all applicable marriages prior to this the and one of you being a Catholic the marriage can be convalidated. Some people suggest to tell non-Catholics that a priest “blessed” your marriage. It’s actually a convalidation. HOWEVER, if your wife is not baptized your marriage will be valid but it will not be sacramental. Only at the time of her baptism will the marriage become sacramental. That’s probably what you heard. If not, you have a very confused pastor.
If your wife is baptist, send her on her marry way to be baptised. Why wait. The Church recognized valid baptisms from other Christian faith traditions. Go to a Church of Christ and say tell them she wants to be part of the Lord’s Church in Baptism. They believe and do it correct. But if she’s bend on converting to Catholicism and insists on being baptized by a priest, then go for it. I hope you both enter RCIA together and go through the learning process of learning what a marriage really is.
Baptists often put a very low premium on what they term the ‘ordinance’ of baptism. They believe, generally, that one becomes a Christian by one’s initial profession of faith in Christ as Savior. My Baptist paternal grandfather was not baptised until he was around forty or so, for example, although he had been a member of that Baptist church for several decades by that time.
There is great variation in Baptist practice from one Baptist church to another, but the following is not uncommonly true: Baptism is, frequently, an act of obedience which a Christian
should partake in at some point in their Christian walk; but it, like the reception of holy communion, is not something particularly important to the Christian walk in the Baptist view.
Hence it is not especially unusual to find a Baptist like my wife who has reached mature adulthood–and who consider themselves very much ‘saved’ and a Christan–without ever having been baptised. A few have reached my wife’s age having never received communion–in many Baptist churches, holy communion is distributed only on Easter Sunday… (A friend of mine served time as a Baptist pastor and told me he found this to be the case more often than he liked: he himself had a higher view of these ‘ordinances’ ).
To suggest therefore that a Baptist ‘lacks’ baptism is sometimes a little insulting because it suggests that the Baptist’s profession of faith was somehow insufficient and they are not truly “Christian”. Suggesting this to my wife, therefore, might be indelicate.
So far as my wife and RCIA are concerned, I would hope that if my wife ever considers joining the Catholic Church, I have an understanding pastor who will waive the normal RCIA process. My wife is not an abstract thinker, does not read often, or very well, and finds classroom-type settings much too difficult to manage. Very much a visual and and immediately-experiential sort of person. RCIA would swiftly extinguish any interest she might have in the Catholic faith.
Not as major an impediment as one might think: the Catholic faith was taught for centuries to people who were very much like my wife. Catholic churches and Catholic worship and devotion are practically tailor-made for such people: in a grand, historic Catholic church, you could teach everything anyone could possibly need to know about the Faith just by using the building, statuary, devotional practices, and the Mass as the source of the curricula.
All of which is still an aside and premature. I did speak to my pastor yesterday afternoon: the parish office is closed this week so I will contact them Monday.
