When ‘Children’s Rights’ Turn Against Children

McAleese appears to want to use State power to stop any parent from having their child baptised, all in the name of ‘children’s rights’ .

This article was written by Anthony McCarthy for Catholic Unscripted.

Anthony McCarthy is Director of the Bios Centre (www.bioscentre.org) and can be contacted at amccarthy@bioscentre.org

He is writing in a personal capacity.

Infant baptism, according to former Irish President Mary McAleese constitutes “a severe restriction on children’s rights”. Apparently she speaks with authority on the issue as “an academic civil lawyer and canon lawyer” who was herself (she regrets to say) baptised Catholic as a baby.

What is this heinous practice that has such a dire effect on babies’ rights? Let us try to understand it both in terms of its nature and its effects.

Saint John Henry Newman joltingly reminds readers of Apologia Pro Vita Suathat,

“if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God.”

To understand why infant baptism now provokes outrage, we must first understand what modernity has forgotten about sin, grace, and belonging.