When the young woman learned that her baptism into the Roman Catholic Church on the night before Easter would be a thorough dousing, her reaction was short and blunt: "Aaagh!"
"You will get very wet," Msgr. Gerald Wilkerson had advised a dozen prospective initiates, including Kirsten Arebalos, 24, at Our Lady of Grace parish in Encino as they began yearlong studies leading to their baptism, confirmation and first Communion in Easter vigil rites.
"I had a sneaking suspicion because we do have that big pool in the corner of the church," said Arebalos, a schoolteacher, "but my husband is Catholic and he had never seen an adult baptism using a pool."
Neither have many other Catholics. But they soon will.
To the dismay of some traditionalists, hundreds of converts to the Catholic Church in Southern California were baptized Saturday night by immersion, typically kneeling in water up to their waists as a priest poured water over their heads and shoulders.
After centuries of using only small fonts for baptizing with a small amount of water on the head, Roman Catholicism is slowly reintroducing baptismal pools into churches in order to hold immersion baptisms in a style approaching that of many Protestant churches.
The purpose: to regain the dramatic Christian symbolism of dying to the old life and rising to the new--an ancient analogy to Jesus being crucified on Good Friday and being raised from the dead on Easter.
But the baptismal pools strike some traditional Catholics as far too close to Bible Belt Protestantism.
"They ask, 'Why are we doing it like them?' " said Father Rod Stephens, director of the Orange diocese office of liturgy. Similarly, a Catholic couple who displayed their company's fast-selling, lightweight baptismal pools at the recent Religious Education Congress in Anaheim said they were offended by a few people who dropped by their booth and asked if they were really Catholics.
Generally, it has been Baptist or Pentecostal Protestant churches that fully submerge initiates in a baptismal pool--or sometimes a handy river. Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran and other old-line Protestant churches baptize by sprinkling water on the forehead, as Catholics did.
Although Catholicism still permits such baptisms, the groundbreaking Second Vatican Council (1962-'65) decided to return to the splashier ceremony of early church history. By the 1980s, Rome deemed immersion the "more suitable" method, except for infants.
