Celine Dion's celebrity baptism

This isn’t exactly earth-shaking news — but when was the last time a celebrity baptism made headlines?

Details:

Celine Dion baptised her twin sons in Las Vegas on Saturday, March 05, 2011.

The singer and her husband Rene Angelil christened four-month-old tots Eddy and Nelson at the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church, in a ceremony that featured chanted prayers and songs.

Her representative said of the Melkite Greek Catholic rite: “It was a beautiful, traditional family ceremony.”

The boys wore gowns by Baby Dior while their 10-year-old brother, Rene-Charles, was one of their godparents, along with Celine’s sister Linda and Rene’s three oldest children, Patrick, Jean-Pierre and Anne-Marie.

200 friends and family were in attendance, including the doctors who helped Celine, 42, conceive the babies through In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) and those who treated 69-year-old Rene when he had cancer over 10 years ago.

You can read more at the link.  And, of course, People magazine has more, too.

For those who are wondering: here’s the Church’s teaching about IVF, which describes the procedure Celine Dion underwent this way:

The marital act is not a manufacturing process, and children are not products. Like the Son of God himself, we are the kind of beings who are “begotten, not made” and, therefore, of equal status and dignity with our parents.

In IVF, children are engendered through a technical process, subjected to “quality control,” and eliminated if found “defective.” In their very coming into being, these children are thoroughly subjected to the arbitrary choices of those bringing them into being. In the words of Donum Vitae: “The connection between in vitro fertilization and the voluntary destruction of human embryos occurs too often. This is significant: through these procedures, with apparently contrary purposes, life and death are subjected to the decision of man, who thus sets himself up as the giver of life and death by decree.” The document speaks of “the right of every person to be conceived and to be born within marriage and from marriage.” To be within and from marriage, conception should occur from the marriage act which by its nature is ordered toward loving openness to life, not from the manipulations of technicians.