When is a priest not a priest?

Matthew Hood of Detroit was ordained as a Catholic priest in 2017.  Or was he?

Hood recently discovered that when he was baptized Catholic as an infant thirty years ago, the officiating deacon mistakenly used the phrase "we baptize you" rather than "I baptize you".  It matters, according to doctrine, because in this situation the officiating cleric is allowing Jesus to "speak through" him, and since Jesus is one person, the grammatical singular is required.

This error means that Hood's baptism was not valid and he has thus technically not been a baptized Catholic all this time.  And since only a baptized Catholic can be a Catholic priest, his ordination in 2017 was not valid either and he has not actually been a priest during those three years, despite sincerely believing he was.  Yes, they are serious.

This has some potentially ominous consequences.  All the attendees at masses he held, who believed they were eating Jesus, were actually just eating ordinary crackers since he did not have the magic power to "transubstantiate" them into the flesh of the deity.  Any couples who were married by him were not "really" married in the eyes of God, and have in fact been committing fornication ever since (and any resulting children are illegitimate) -- not because of any error in the marriage ritual, nor even in Hood's ordination, but in his baptism thirty years before.  Presumably any confessions he heard and absolution he offered don't count either.  People more familiar than I am with Catholicism's intricate rules could probably think of more examples.

Since the error was discovered, Hood has been "correctly" baptized and subjected to all the necessary rituals to make him a "real" priest, but evidently they can't do this retroactively, so anybody he performed rituals for in the last three years has problems.  Hood's archdiocese is trying to contact all such people to straighten things out.

All because some guy thirty years ago said "we" instead of "I".  Well, exact wording is important in magic spells, but didn't Jesus object to this kind of scribe-and-Pharisee bureaucratic hairsplitting approach to religion in his own time?  And wouldn't a loving, or even sane, God cut everybody a little slack in this kind of situation?

How many times do errors like this happen and never get detected?  Oh, as long as everybody accepts a priest as a priest, it makes no practical difference, but in the eyes of Catholic dogma, presumably an invalid baptism or later ordination ritual does mean a priest is not "really" a priest and all the rituals he performs in his career are not valid, even if nobody ever finds out.  I've seen claims that such things could not have happened before the twentieth century because they were doing all this stuff in Latin which is supposedly "more precise", but I've also read that many surviving Church documents in Latin from the Middle Ages are riddled with grammatical errors.  Would God spurn a ritual as worthless because the officiating cleric got the genitive-case plural of an irregular third-declension noun wrong, perhaps reading from a document containing the error?  It seems no more absurd than such dire consequences following from the mix-up of "we" and "I" in English.

Worse yet, only a validly-ordained cleric can ordain someone else as a priest -- so if a cleric whose ordination was invalid due to such an error ordains a priest, that priest is not "really" a priest either, and neither is any future priest he ordains in the course of his career, and so on.  One blunder a few centuries ago could result in a whole proliferation of undetected "not-real" ordinations, with dozens of priests today unknowingly being fakes -- meaning countless couples not validly married, sins not validly absolved, altar boys not validly molested, etc.

Such absurdities follow inevitably from this kind of bureaucratic, Kafkaesque approach to religion, where what are basically magical spells and incantations are believed to have such powerful effects on personal status -- where it is mere words rather than the nature and behavior of a thing or person that determine what or who that thing or person "is".  If Satan exists, he's laughing his ass off over this one.

(See also here for another curious implication of Catholic doctrine.)