At this point, I wouldn't necessarily classify it as "pressure," but my dad asked me yesterday if we were going to christen LO, and when I said no, he really pressed it a bit. He commented that we don't need to do it in a Catholic church (which we couldn't -- we weren't married in the (or any) church and don't attend a church and aren't practicing Catholics any longer and have no intention of raising LO Catholic -- no offense whatsoever to those who believe otherwise, however), and that he'll have the original sin if we don't do it, and he and my mother weren't churchgoers when I was born and I was still baptized, etc.

A while back, I was toying with it because I thought it was just something you were supposed to do, and people here helped me realize that if we're not religious and don't believe in the theology behind christening and don't intend to raise our child as a Catholic or a Christian, then we shouldn't do it. In fact, I believe that doing it just to appease somebody makes a sort of joke out of the people who do it and mean it.

But then I was venting elsewhere after the conversation with my dad, and it was brought up that for him, as a (now) practicing Catholic (he returned to the faith after my mother died), it's probably very scary to think about his only grandchild not being able to enter heaven. So even though I have this strong belief against doing it on the one hand, I now have a creeping guilt that perhaps there is some way to do it to make our family feel more comfortable without feeling like we are lying, or making a mockery of anybody's faith.

Has anybody been in a similar situation -- neither you nor DH are religious and don't intend to raise LO in a particular faith, but ended up having a christening of some sort because of family feelings? How do you even go about doing something like that?

Or should we just stand our ground and do this the way we've already decided to? For the record, I have no problem with LO finding a religion later on and becoming baptized/christened/blessed into it on his own. I find that much more preferable and palatable to just randomly picking a church that will do it just to "do" it. But I also don't want my dad living in fear that if, god forbid, something were to happen to LO, he would be separated from him in the afterlife (that's my understanding of the Catholic belief, at least).