Infant Conscripts? Well, well. . .

Ex-president of Ireland says baptism creates “infant conscripts”

In this March 23, 2007 file photo, then-President of Ireland Mary McAleese poses with Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican. McAleese says she will not attend this summer’s World Meeting of Families in Dublin, which will feature Pope Francis, because it will be a “reinforcement of orthodoxy.” (Credit: Alberto Pizzoli, Pool/AP.)

LEICESTER, United Kingdom - Baptizing babies is a violation of their human rights, according to the former president of Ireland.

Mary McAleese, who served in the largely ceremonial role of president from 1997-2011, also said she would not attend the Aug. 22-26 World Meeting of Families taking place in Dublin.
She told the Irish Times the event, which Pope Francis will attend Aug. 25-26, will only serve as a “political rally” for the “reinforcement of orthodoxy.”

McAleese told the newspaper that by baptizing children before they have reached the age of reason, the Church is creating “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 14 or 19 ‘here is what you contracted, here is what you signed up to’ because the truth is they didn’t,” she said.

Declaring that in the past “people didn’t understand that they had the right to say no, the right to walk away,” the former Irish president said “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.”

McAleese is a practicing Catholic who holds a licentiate in canon law from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Her book Quo Vadis? Collegiality in the Code of Canon Law was published in 2012.  In recent years, she has become vocal in her opposition to Church teachings on homosexuality and women’s ordination.

My Comments:

So this is what a practicing Catholic looks like?  Well now, I guess Lutherans are not the only ones who have people rebelling against church teaching and claiming to be real Lutherans. . .