Intense.
We’d like to think we’re all pretty familiar with how the standard baptism is performed.
You go to your local church, the priest holds the baby, and dips the back of the baby’s head into some water. The baby maybe cries a bit while wearing a white dress and everyone is pretty happy about the whole scenario.
Standard.
However, a video has emerged online of a baptism that’s fairly intense and a lot of people can’t really believe what they’re seeing.
This is it.
IS THIS YOUR PRIEST!!!????? pic.twitter.com/SV1XJCnnIl
— Honey Pot 🍯 (@Miss_Patriciah) May 8, 2018
In case you can’t, or don’t want to, watch the video, here’s a quick summary of what happens in the clip.
A Greek Orthodox priest grips a naked baby by the shoulders and quickly dunks the infant into the water three times while some children look on shocked in the background.
The infant is then handed to a man who wraps the baby in a towel to dry him off.
The person who shared the video on Twitter, T’Chelah, captioned the footage “is this your priest????”
She then followed up with another tweet saying “this baby’s gonna be traumatised forever.”
This baby’s gonna be traumatized forever.
— T’Chelah (@Miss_Patriciah) May 8, 2018
Other people then began commenting on the video saying that the baptism looked “awful” and that the other children in the video were “having flashbacks.”
However, some users then stated that this kind of baptism was “normal” in the Greek Orthodox religion and that “every baby baptised in orthodox tradition goes through this.”
That is actually an orthodox baptism. Every baby baptised in orthodox tradition goes through this. I personally been through this as a baby and I am doing well, so don’t worry the baby won’t have any trauma.
— Ana Mrt (@AnaMarti2000) May 9, 2018
This person also argued that the babies weren’t traumatised because “millions of people have been baptised this way.”
Do you really think that this ancestral tradition wouldn’t have stopped if children were really traumatized? Millions of people have been baptized this way throughout centuries
— Ana Mrt (@AnaMarti2000) May 9, 2018
The video has received over 100,000 favourites and almost 55,000 retweets.