OK, the time has passed for me to modify my previous post. My son is nauseated, throwing up, and I had to drop everything, to go get him medicine from the other house.
Let me make sure I understand. Let's say it's July. Joe Blow goes to the priest and said he'd like to be catechized and baptized. While I am no fan of "quickie catechesis" --- "here, read the catechism, come to class every week, get the information in your head, then we'll do the baptism" --- neither am I a fan of prolonged waiting to be baptized. On the Novus Ordo side of the moon, this whole RCIA thing, drawing it out as long as two years, seems to me, to be a tacit rejection of the necessity of baptism for salvation. People die in their sleep of unknown frailties, and die in car accidents, every day of the world. Prince Philip recently died in his sleep (not entirely unexpected given his age and known frailty). So did Margaret Thatcher, Warren Carroll, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee. If I am a priest, and Joe Blow comes to me the first of July, I tell him "we'll start the lessons now, but you have to wait until Easter, regardless of how 'ready' you are, let's say, in November", then he dies in a car wreck on New Year's Eve, how is it "okay" for me to have had to force him to wait, die without baptism, with everything that goes with that (if we intepret the necessity for baptism strictly)"?
Somebody help me out here, eh?