Perhaps the reason why Ireland has descended into a leftist sinkhole is because the country had Mary McAleese as their president from 1997 to 2011.
Talk about a Catholic hater; not only has this woman referred to the Church as an “empire of misogyny,” she now advocates that infant baptism, a regular practice for Catholics, violates a baby’s “human rights.”
According to Catholic teaching, infant baptism removes a child of original sin and brings them into the light of God. If performed by a Catholic priest, the baby instantly becomes a member of the Church, a calling that they fulfill throughout their lives as they choose to partake in the other Sacraments of salvation: Holy Communion, Confession, Confirmation, etc.
Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, and Presbyterians all perform infant baptisms, who all cite Paul’s account in Col. 2:11-12 that baptism has replaced the ancient custom of circumcision. Jews also still perform ritualized circumcision on infant babies, a practice that leftists have equally decried in recent years.
McAleese, however, believes that babies baptized into the Catholic Church become “infant conscripts who are held to lifelong obligations of obedience.”
“You can’t impose, really, obligations on people who are only two weeks old and you can’t say to them at seven or eight or fourteen or nineteen ‘here is what you contracted, here is what you signed up to’ because the truth is they didn’t,” McAleese told the Irish Times.
“But you and I know, we live now in times where we have the right to freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of opinion, freedom of religion and freedom to change religion. The Catholic Church yet has to fully embrace that thinking,” she continued. “My human right to inform my own conscience, my human right to express my conscience even if it is the case that it contradicts the magisterium [teaching authority of the church], that right to conscience is supreme.”
McAleese’s rallying cry against the Catholic Church echoes the words of famed atheist Richard Dawkins when he likened child baptism to “child abuse.”