“Born yesterday, baptized today, buried tomorrow”: Early baptism as an indicator of negative life outcomes in rural Spain, 1890-1939

Abstract

For centuries, the Catholic Church demanded that baptisms take place in the hours immediately after birth. This custom began to lose importance in the last decade of the nineteenth century, which increased the average time between birth and baptism. However, some children continued to be baptized shortly following their birth. Our objective is to analyze whether early baptism could serve as an indicator of the state of a child’s health in the short and long term. In our examination of the period 1890-1939, the results confirm that children with early baptisms were more likely to die (especially during the first month of life), married earlier and at a greater rate compared to the general population and, probably, experienced shorter lifespans.

Keywords:

• Cumulative disadvantage
• health disparities
• child development
• Spain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 J. Arnal told us his story orally before passing away shortly thereafter.

2 As we have verified in the various interviews conducted in the study area.

3 Through a nominative linkage record, each individual has information on his or her birth, baptism, marriage and death (if these events were registered in the reference villages).

4 In all these cases we used OLS models because we selected a continuous dependent variable.

5 That is, we have grouped individuals by year of birth into 5-year groups.

6 In some cases, the allegations were rejected by the authorities after several medical examinations.

7 We consider in this category only those people who we know for sure were single at the age of 45 and we have evidence of their presence in the study area. With respect to out-migrants, as we cannot ascertain their presence in the locality as single people aged 45 or older, they have been omitted for the analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, projects PID2022-138886NB-I00 and PGC2018-095529-B-I00, from the Government of Aragon, research group S55_23R.