Former Irish President Claims Infant Baptism Violates 'Children's Rights'

If the Left can't outlaw the Seal of the Confessional, it makes sense that they would go after Baptism. Anything to undermine the Church's teachings!

From LifeSite News

By Andreas Wailzer

Mary McAleese, the pro-LGBT and pro-abortion former president of Ireland, attacked infant baptism, which frees children from original sin and opens to them the life of grace.

The former president of Ireland claimed that infant baptism violates children’s human rights.

The Irish Times published an excerpt from a recent talk by Mary McAleese at University College Cork (UCC), in which the heterodox Catholic made her case against infant baptism.

“Throughout the world, there continues a long-standing, systemic and overlooked severe restriction on children’s rights with regard to religion,” the former president of Ireland wrote.

“It restricts children’s rights as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 and United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989, to which both Ireland and the Holy See – which governs the Catholic Church and is effectively the author of canon law – are State Parties.”

McAleese, who was president of Ireland from 1997 to 2011, argued that children are restricted in their religious freedom by infant baptism, to which they cannot personally consent, and through which they become “a member for life” in the Catholic Church.

“Catholic parents are under a strict Catholic canon law obligation to have their children baptised at the earliest opportunity, hence infant Baptism is normative,” she said.

“I am not challenging the routine practice of infant Baptism itself, insofar as Baptism concerns gratuitous spiritual effects which the Church claims are indelible, like expunging original sin, opening up the possibility of salvation and the flow of God’s grace.”

However, she challenged the “imposed life membership without sentient consent” in the institution of the Catholic Church.

“Nothing else was to shape my life so powerfully or impose such formidable restrictions on my inalienable intellectual human rights as that brief Sunday Baptism ceremony 7½ decades ago,” McAleese said regarding her own baptism. “It does the same to the almost 40,000 children baptised every day across five continents, enrolling them as life members of the Church with a no-exit policy and without their consent.”

The Catholic Church teaches that baptism is necessary for salvation and that denying infants this sacrament endangers their soul and their eternal salvation.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth in Baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called. The sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation is particularly manifest in infant Baptism. The Church and the parents would deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confer Baptism shortly after birth.“

While it is true that baptism confers imprints and an indelible character on the soul that cannot be reversed, McAleese’s claim that infant baptism violates the right to religious freedom is highly dubious. A Catholic who leaves the Church or is excommunicated does, in a sense, remain a member of the body of Christ through the imprint of baptism; however, they are not in full communion anymore and cannot receive the sacraments. In practice, anyone can leave the Church without Catholic authorities imposing any physical restriction on them, as millions have done in recent decades.

While separating oneself from the Church does have severe spiritual consequences, i.e., endangering one’s eternal salvation, there is no physical punishment for it. Even those who apostatize and join another religion are not physically prevented by Church authorities from doing so. Therefore, the “religious freedom” in the modern sense of these individuals is not violated.

In contrast, in the Islamic religion, apostasy is to be punished by death, and converts from Islam to Christianity often live under constant fear for their lives and are frequently threatened, sometimes even by their own family members.

McAleese has claimed before that infant baptism violates a baby’s human rights, as LifeSiteNews reported in 2018. In 2019, she published a study titled Children’s Rights and Obligations in Canon Law, which examines the application of Canon Law to children and its potential violations of so-called “children’s rights.”

The former Irish president is a heretical self-professed Catholic who has been outspoken in her support of homosexuality and “women priests,” and has criticized Catholic teaching on marriage and family as “homophobic” and “completely contradictory to modern understanding.”

In 2018, she referred to the Catholic Church as “one of the last great bastions of misogyny.”

Pictured: Mary McAleese, Uachtarán (President) of Ireland, 11 November 1997 – 10 November 2011