No baptism for Kenzo

More problems of a different sort for the Catholic church here in France. A priest has refused to baptise a two-and-a-half-year-old boy because the parents hadn't sent their two older children for religious education after they had been baptised.

The parents of little Kenzo had set July 3 as the date to have their son baptised.

But when the mother, Chrystèle Fernandez, went along to discuss the final arrangements with the priest in the parish of Saint-Jean-Lavérune in the south of France, things didn't quite go as she had hoped.

Instead she was told that Kenzo's baptism couldn't go ahead.

The reason she was given, according to the regional daily Midi Libre, was that the priest, Paul Roudier, wasn't happy that one of her other sons wasn't receiving religious instruction.

"The priest asked me whether my 10-year-old was attending catechism classes," she told the newspaper.

"When I said that we had offered him the opportunity to go but he had refused, he (Father Roudier) said that under such circumstances he couldn't go ahead with Kenzo's baptism," she continued.

Even though Fernandez explained that she had not wanted to force her eldest son to do something against his will but had left the choice up to him, Father Roudier remained resolute in turning down the request for Kenzo to be baptised.

He admitted that the decision has been an "unpleasant one" to take, but for him baptism represented the "starting point" and there was a responsibility afterwards "to educate".

"If you want a child to discover what the church has to offer then you have to give him a taste of it," he said.

"And sometimes that has to be an obligation," he continued.

A disappointment as far as Fernandez is concerned who had hoped that the Catholic church would be a little more flexible in its decision-making.

"We're not regular church-goers but we're still believers," she said.

"Now it'll just have to be up to Kenzo to decide what he wants to later."

The case is far from being an isolated one here in France.

In early February this year, according to the national daily Aujourd'hui en France, parents of a 10-month-old child in the town of Evry, just on the outskirts of the French capital, were told that their latest addition to the family couldn't be baptised because his three older siblings "hadn't been receiving religious instruction" and the parents "were not regular church-goers."

And just a couple of weeks later national radio reported the case of a baby girl in the small town of Saint-Jean-de-Boiseau in western France who was refused a baptism because her older sister once again hadn't been "enrolled in religious instruction classes."