In mid-January 2026, an utmost leftist activist from Ireland, Mary McAleese,published an opinion arguing that baby baptism — a conventional Catholic practice — allegedly limits children's rights and conflicts with global standards for the protection of human rights. According to her, the fact that infants become full members of the Catholic Church, before being able to make their own decision, would constitute a violation of the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the Convention on the Rights of the kid (UNCRC).
The Irish utmost left demands a ban on the baptism of children. Password thrown by Mary McAleese it immediately became an inflammatory point of public debate. For Catholic faithful, her argument is not only theologically erroneous, but besides ideologically marked by an effort to reinterpret religion by the prism of modern ideology of the "rights of the child", which inadequately transfer political categories to the sphere of religion and sacraments.
The reaction of Catholics in Ireland was fast and clear. The clergy and the faithful emphasized that baby baptism was a practice rooted in the Christian tradition since the first century, based on the literal meaning of Christ's missionary command: “Go and teach all nations, baptizing them...”.
Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan pointed out that baptism is an act of love on the part of parents who want for their children a relation with God and a anticipation of surviving in grace. He besides pointed out that a postponement of baptism to later years would be ridiculous — they would not refuse the youngest physical good, specified as bread or medical care, so the sacrament cannot be treated as a form of “disposal of rights”.
Similarly, Father Owen Gorman said that the Church is not trying to “control” man, but is offering him the grace and salvation that anyone can accept, besides as an adult. For Catholics, baptism is not a tool of power, but a sacrament of spiritual life and the household of the Church.
Mahon McCann, a doctorate and recently baptized Catholic, rightly noted that there is no secular or canonical mechanics that would force the baptized to practice faith, and that adult spiritual freedom remains intact by the very fact of baptism as a child.
The problem in discussions with angry lefts like McAleese is not just about theological criticism, but about ideological shift of the weight of concepts. Calling the sacrament, which, in Catholic tradition, is simply a sign of grace, as “the depriving of rights”, is an effort to transfer secular terminology and worldview categories to spiritual grounds where they have a different function and meaning.
This explanation may be due to a broad trend in left-wing circles, namely that everything conventional and Catholic must be brought into the language of individual absolute autonomy — and thus even spiritual practice cannot be justified without the consent of a "individual consumer" or "citizen-consumer". McAleese in his arguments seems to adapt this logic: if there is no informed consent, automatic inclusion of the kid in the community constitutes a violation of his rights.
The rejection of conventional baptism practice in the name of abstract rights of the individual leads to the same kind of ideological tyranny, which critics of the left-wing worldview besides see in another areas, e.g. freedom of speech and the press, where the main determinant of what is slow and what is not is the abstract "word of hatred".
OUR COMMENTS: It is worth noting that the same far-left activists, who so eagerly attack the Catholic Church, did not even hesitate about judaic circumcision rites. Unlike Catholic baptism, these are painful and bloody acts, frequently associated with elements of pedophile practices (in their course any rabbis suck the mouths of infants' penises).
Photo by Mary McAleese.
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