IT WAS appropriate that the service was held in the oldest
Christian building in Switzerland, the church of Riva San Vitale,
near Lugano. The leaders of six churches - Roman Catholic, Old
Catholic, Swiss Reformed, Methodist, Lutheran, and Anglican (from
the diocese in Europe) - joined in a service at
which they signed a new agreement on the mutual recognition of
baptism.
The service started in the fifth-century baptistery, where
everyone had to squeeze around the massive font, more than two
metres in diameter and carved from a single piece of rock.
The font is still used, but a smaller bowl is always placed
inside it, and it was that bowl that the President of the
Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches, Dr Gottfried Locher,
ceremonially filled at the start of the service. Bishop Harald
Rein, of the Old Catholic Church, dipped the paschal candle in it
three times, and a Lutheran minister sprinkled the congregation
with the water.
Prayers were said in four national languages, and the text of
the San Vitali Declaration was read out and then signed. It
affirmed the importance of baptism as an initiation into the
Christian faith, and recognised that it could be validly
administered in more than one way. It also confirmed that people do
not need to be baptised again if they move from one Church to
another. Representatives of the Orthodox and Baptist Churches,
together with the Salvation Army, had taken part in discussion of
the Declaration, and supported its principle.
