(LifeSiteNews) — Catholics in Ireland defended the Catholic practice of infant baptism against former president Mary McAleese’s claim that it violates children’s human rights.
McAleese criticized what she described as baptism’s “imposed life membership” in the Catholic Church “without sentient consent” during a recent talk at University College Cork (UCC), an excerpt of which was published by The Irish Times.
“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,” said McAleese, falsely suggesting that the Holy See is beholden to UN decisions.
Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan explained to EWTN News by analogy why baptism is bestowed on infants in the Catholic Church, noting that it has been practiced in the Church since the first century and has been since in most Christian denominations.
“If we were to say we will wait until a child is an adult to make such a decision, well, then, what other decisions would we deny taking for our children? Would we, for example, not give them good food? Will we show them the beauty of exercise and would we not give them good medical care? Would we wait until they could make their own decisions?”
“One of the first things that the Catholic parent does to their child is to take his little hand or her little hand and make the sign of the cross. What a beautiful thing. Why do parents do it? Because they want their child to have a relationship with a living God throughout their life and lead them into eternal life,” Cullinan said.
Father Owen Gorman similarly described baptism as an act of love for a child, in the desire to impart to them a spiritual good.
The Church “encourages infant baptism out of love for souls, and so that the babies of Catholic parents would receive the best start in life, that they would be plunged into the mystery of Christ and that they would be filled with God’s life,” Gorman said.
“And that is a great good, and it is a great good that should not be postponed,” he added. “As a mother, she is loving her children, and she is wise in directing parents to bring the children to the grace of God and the saving waters of baptism from a young age. It is about providing that which is best for them, so it enables them to have the best life possible, as part of the body of Christ, the Church.
“So the Church desires it not out of a sense of wanting to control people or exert power over them but to give as a wise and provident mother,” he concluded.
Mahon McCann, a doctoral student in ethics who was raised atheist by parents who were baptized Catholic and was himself baptized into the Catholic faith in 2025, pointed out that baptism cannot in any way interfere with the free will of its recipients.
“My parents simply ‘canceled their subscription to the Resurrection’ in their own minds and stopped going to Mass, etc., like many Catholics today. The Church can do nothing to legally compel you to pursue holiness,” he told EWTN News.
McCann also stressed that approaching infant baptism purely from a “human rights” perspective is insufficient to properly assess the practice because Catholicism goes above and beyond such human rights frameworks by seeking the ultimate good of the person, which is holiness.
He also repudiated McAleese’s understanding of baptism as “a legal contract between two parties” as a “superficial” and misconstrual of tradition that parents always pass on to their children.
“A tradition, by definition, is intergenerational — a tradition that isn’t passed on from one generation to another isn’t a tradition,” McCann said.
“The idea that babies and children should ‘consent’ to be part of a particular tradition is as ridiculous as saying that they should choose what language they are going to speak,” he added.
McAleese, a heretical self-professed Catholic, decried infant baptisms including her own as injurious to so-called “intellectual human rights.”
“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 during her recent talk at UCC. “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.”
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 that examines the application of Canon Law to children and its potential violations of so-called “children’s rights.”
The former Irish president 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.”
