My experience, and I do baptismal preparation, is that priests aren’t willing enough to be the ‘bad guy’. I can tell parents about the rules but if the priest refuses to enforce them my hands are tied.
As an example, in the last month or so I had a child of an unmarried couple baptized. The godparents were also an unmarried couple, neither of whom has set foot in Church in years. There is no way the priest would have even suggested to them that something was wrong with this scenario.
One particularly distressing incident a few years ago: the mother (in a common-law marriage) chose her sister and former brother-in-law as sponsors. The sister & BIL had split up a few months before after 11 months of marriage when she moved in with a lover 25 years her senior, leaving hubby with a 4 year old daughter to raise (common-law relationship before the Catholic wedding which a situation with the KofC had pressured them into – story for another day). They now disliked each other so much that they couldn’t even sit in the same pew together and anytime she inadvertantly got close to him in the sanctuary during the ceremony he quickly moved away. The icing on the cake is that she had her lover with her at the ceremony. I wanted to throw up.
A few months later the mother called to see if she could remove the godfather’s name from the records since he no longer wanted to be the godfather – in fact wanted as little to do with the family as humanly possible.
