Empty Handed

I’m supposed to be becoming a Godfather to a good friend’s baby son later on this year, but there’s a complication - I’m not religious. Well, I suppose that’s not the complication, as such, after all none of the God parents to my two sons are at all religious as far as I can tell, and that wasn’t a problem (leave aside the moral and logical issues here, for a second - I’m not religious and neither is my partner, but we had our kids christened anyway, giving them non-religious God parents whilst swearing blind to the vicar (or whatever) that we were dead into god an’ that and so were the god parents). No, the real complication is that it’s to be a catholic christening. Now, I don’t believe in god, and I think anyone who does is just mis-guided and wasting their time (no, I probably wouldn’t say it to the vicars face), but at least the catholics are taking it seriously and really buying into it, and I really respect that. The local church where we had the boys christened just didn’t care, or at least not enough to bother asking us any hard questions. Whilst this was, shall we say, convenient for our purposes, I think it’s intellectually lazy and on the verge of morally reprehensible that they let us get away with it. Whilst I really only went along with the xenings for an easy life (and because of The Deal), I actually took the job of choosing the God fathers really seriously, on the basis that if you’re going to do something, do it in the spirit in which it is intended, so I picked people who fit the criteria (all bar the actual believing in god thing) - they should be morally upstanding, sensible, likely to take an interest in the boys development (and bring them gifts!) yada yada yada - rather than just picking someone who would be fun to have a drink with afterwards and then fuck off and never see the kid again.

But the catholic thing is a whole new world - it will be a catholic christening in a catholic country (Portugal) and, until today, I just assumed me being a god father just wasn’t going to happen, and that would have been OK, and I’d have gone over anyway and would still take an interest in the child and care about his upbringing and buy him presents at christmas and birthdays and generally look out for him, so actually being a god father officially, like, wouldn’t really matter. I got to assuming all this because it seemed that, to qualify, I must be a catholic and have taken (done? eaten?) my (the?) sacraments and have one of those big gold things with incense billowing out and, you know, believe in God and stuff. Today, though, I’ve found out that I don’t need to be all that (unlike Rachael Leigh Cook) - all I need is a simple letter from my ‘local’ catholic priest to say that I’m a reliable person. And that’s the main point of this post, really:

How am I going to get one of those?

I’m expecting this to go all sitcom on me.