When christenings happened in secret

Modern day christenings might appear fairly benign on the surface, says Julie Canlis, but they still bear vestiges of an older, more perilous, rite of baptism.

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

A father wearing a suit carries his child who is dressed for a christening in white.

A Mexican father carries his son to a christening.

Photo by Marco Antonio Casique Reyes on Unsplash.

Christians today are baptized – often christened as babies – as part of an ancient entry rite into the church. Some of you reading this were probably christened, or have attended christenings, as a conventional rite of passage. But eighteen centuries ago, joining a church was not for the faint of heart. Baptisms happened at Easter, often in secret, and only after a semi-Olympic training of three years in order to be allowed into its secret membership. Every aspect of preparation was vital – almost brutal – aimed at the spiritual survival (certainly not bodily survival) of the church and its members. This was no pinky handshake. Why would people want to join at all? This was an ordeal which, if one passed, meant public shame at best and lions if the wrong emperor reigned.

First there was the obstacle of finding one. Churches were secret, often hidden in remote underground catacombs, and undetected by officials. Those who risked their lives to bring ‘candidates’ for membership into their secret fellowship had to vouch for character because betrayal could mean death for all gathered. (Enter the first 'godparents' into the rites of the church).

Second, one’s profession could mean disqualification: if a gladiator, prostitute, or actor was seeking admission, they would be given three years to stop their vocation – and begin caring for the poor, the orphans, and the widows of the city. Within these years, they were only allowed to hover on the outer threshold of the church, increasing desire for the more classified rite of the eucharist. Stock items such as the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed were kept strictly confidential until the week prior to baptism (never written – only memorized), lest they be handed out too early to those who would later fall away.

All this was leading up to the clandestine rite of initiation – baptism – which occurred in the middle of the night, Easter eve. After fasting until sunset for 40 days (enter the modern practice of Lent), these candidates would undergo final questions during Holy Week. They took part in daily exorcisms, rejecting all darkness in their life, and culminating in the final renunciation: “I renounce you Satan, and all your works and all your empty promises.” An ancient description of bling.

They were also examined by the local bishop for whether their lives were characterized by social justice: were they caring for the sick? were they living according to an obsolescent class system or into their new reality as equals? were they treating their bodies as temples of God? As one fourth-century bishop exhorted in the middle of Easter night, “why do you stand there, different in race, age, sex, and rank, who will soon be one?” Baptism was the great leveler, like death.

And die they did. Earliest baptisms were held in secret, but as Christianity was sporadically tolerated, people were baptized in mausoleums – Roman funerary buildings, to communicate very loudly: you are coming here to die. These primitive structures continue to be unearthed all over Europe, every time a new underground route is being laid, or a skyscraper is being dug. And the foundations tell all: large fonts to walk down into, shaped like crosses, octagons, or even wombs. Here you go down to die, and be reborn. Archaeology reveals hooks on walls for cast off clothing, for the candidates were to become like newborn infants again. Plunged into the waters three times, they emerged naked and were clothed in white – a symbol of overcoming suffering and of primal innocence. In this upside-down society, one went into the water having been classes as a Competent One (competentes) but was upgraded after baptism to the nickname of Infant (infantes) – even higher praise. And the reward? Finally, being admitted past the gate (origination of the church ‘narthex’) into the sanctuary itself, to take part in its contraband banquet: the bread and wine.

Modern day christenings might appear fairly benign on the surface, but they still bear vestiges of this older, more perilous rite. We have godparents, white garments, and a triple splash of water. The Book of Common Prayer still requires parents and godparents to renounce Satan on behalf of the baby, that supposed figment of our imagination. And although we have lost much of the symbolism of death and rebirth, one thing hasn’t changed: this adorable baby will still die. For the ancients, one’s death was merely the completion of baptism, in which one had already begun the art and process of learning to die. Baptism didn’t keep one from death, but baptism “baptized” death and allowed one to get on with living.

Column

Creed

Feminism

Monastic life

29 May 2025

4 min read

Cancelled but not forgotten, the medieval heretic who still intrigues today

Despite erasure and desecration, Guglielma was a trailblazer.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Seth Johnston on Unsplash.

Is it possible to be martyred years after dying a natural death? The question occurs to me under the Alps between Lyon and Milan and arises from a late thirteenth century story of Guglielma, a spirited 50-year-old to say the least.

She arrived in Milan in 1260 like Ruby Tuesday. No one knew where she came from and yesterday didn’t matter, because it was gone. She lived in poverty, but gathered quite a following. Some said she was the daughter of the King of Bohemia (she was certainly bohemian in the cultic sense), others that she was the cousin of Elizabeth of Hungary or had been married to an English prince.

Guglielma (we have no surname) claimed equality with God, a new dawn for womanhood, and according to a contemporary account stated she was “the Holy Spirit made flesh for the redemption of women” whom she baptised “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of herself.”

Some 20 years after she died, Dominican agents of the Inquisition arrived in Milan and burned a top nun, Maifreda da Pirovano of the local ruling family, at the stake, for claiming that she would be made Pope. Then they pitched up at the Abbey of Chiaravalle, desecrated Guglielma’s tomb, dragged her mouldering remains to a field and burned her bones to dust, scattering her ashes to the winds.

I resolved to embark on a little pilgrimage to Chiaravalle when I arrived in Milan, to pay my respects to Guglielma, my kind of heretic. I’d never heard of her before a short account from the podcasting historian Tom Holland, whose book Dominion, on “the making of the western mind”, I was finishing as I crossed the Italian border.

Pilgrims used to visit her tomb twice a year in the Middle Ages before she was violently exhumed. But you’ll find no record of her at Chiaravalle now. Bizarrely, there were Italian supercars being photographed outside of the abbey when I arrived, but it’s peaceful and original, nonetheless. And Guglielma is, of course, missing.

Speak to one of the Cistercian monks there and they will affect not to have heard of her, then murmur “heretic” and “Bohemian.” But a gentle monk called Davide sweetly told me he would show me her former tomb, in the private grounds out of bounds to visitors, if I returned in 20 minutes.

We walked through the brothers’ vegetable garden and cemetery, where hares were nibbling around a statue of St Francis and the trees grew unruly. There, under a twelfth century arch, was her former grave, now marked with the names of local Milanese benefactors of the abbey. I wondered if they had known they would be laid to rest in heretical soil. The birds sang on.

As such, heresy serves as a reminder not only to overthrow prevailing orthodoxies, but is also divinely owned.

There are lessons to learn from the Gugliema cult. The first is that, as the author of Ecclesiastes has it, there really is nothing new under the sun. Women have been fighting the patriarchy perhaps since Mary Magdalene encountered “the gardener” outside an empty tomb.

There was no word for “deaconess” in the early church, only deacons. The Gugliemites were heralding the dawn of a new age for the Christian Church run by women. That may not be wholly the ambition of today’s women priests, but let’s note in passing that it’s taken more than another 700 years for women to be consecrated as bishops.

The second point is that she really might have had a point about the Holy Spirit. Claiming the third person of the Trinity as herself may have gone a bit far, even by today’s standards, but for a God who holds within “himself” all gender, there is a venerable tradition of considering the Spirit as female.

The Hebrew bible often casts this spirit as female, as in the book Proverbs, where Wisdom is a woman who “shouts in the streets” and “cries out in the public square.” It was St Paul, much later, who said she must keep quiet in church.

Guglielma is a saint only in Folk Catholicism, but women like her and Maifreda were authentic witnesses and trailblazers for women’s apostleship. We can still be too sniffy, even afraid, of heresy and we do well to remember the main charge against the Nazarene at his arrest and execution was precisely that. As such, heresy serves as a reminder not only to overthrow prevailing orthodoxies, but is also divinely owned.

As I left Guglielma’s last grave, I knew it was empty of her, not unlike that other empty tomb. Her violators had liberated her into the world. She’d gone before me.

It was fitting that her ashes had been thrown to the wind, like the wind that had moved across the waters in the act of creation; like the wind that had blown over other disciples at Pentecost. And like the wind that was now gently rustling the trees in this quiet monastic back garden.

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