CORK (IRELAND)
Irish Times [Dublin, Ireland]
January 11, 2026
By Mary McAleese
Rite & Reason: No one is Catholic by birth and the notion of ‘Baptismal promises’ is risible
Throughout the world, there continues a long-standing, systemic and overlooked severe restriction on children’s rights with regard to religion. This warrants, but has yet to receive, serious examination. It impacts Ireland in a special way and contemporary circumstances make Ireland an ideal place to conduct that examination.
Let me set the scene with a couple of brief, inter-related stories. They concern the relationship between children’s rights and religion in Ireland, and certain unchallenged aspects of the canon law of Ireland’s major Christian denomination and provider of education, the Latin Catholic Church.
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.
It’s an area where I have direct empirical experience as a Catholic Church member by Baptism for almost 75 years. I also have academic expertise in relation to it, as both an academic civil lawyer and canon lawyer specialising in the Catholic Church’s system of canon law, as it impacts children’s rights. It is also impacted by contemporary understanding of children’s rights in international law and the obligations the Holy See undertook as a State Party to the UNCRC.
The first story.
Any of you who are theologically literate and have seen the film Mary Queen of Scots, starring Saoirse Ronan, will have noticed a glaring error in the dramatic piece of text with which the film opened. It declared, “Mary Queen of Scots was born a Catholic”.
In fact she was not. No one is Catholic by birth but becomes a Catholic by Baptism. She became a member of the Catholic Church when, within hours of her birth, she was baptised in a brief ceremony in the local Catholic Church. As a consequence of this, Church law deemed her to have been enrolled as a member for life, with substantial inescapable obligations of membership.
Church membership is the man-made juridic effect of Baptism. There are other effects which are spiritual and divinely ordained in nature, according to Church teaching and with which I take no issue.
The second story.
Four-hundred years later, at two weeks old, I too was baptised and enrolled as a life member of the Catholic Church. It was the briefest of ceremonies during which, I am told, I stayed fast asleep, to the delight of my parents, godparents and the priest.
Ten years later, when I was automatically lined up with my Catholic convent school classmates to receive the sacrament of Confirmation, we were asked, as Catholic children are today at Confirmation, to “renew our Baptismal promises”. But there never were personal Baptismal promises. The idea is risible. What possible promises could non-sentient babies make? How can they be renewed when they were never made in the first place?
Yet these fictitious Baptismal promises are a significant part of the foundational narrative on which the Church’s governing authorities claim authority over Church members and claim members must honour the compulsory obligations entered into at Baptism. These mostly concern submission to magisterial control (to the authority and teachings of the Pope and bishops) rather than to Christian love of neighbour.
Catholic parents are under a strict Catholic canon law obligation to have their children baptised at the earliest opportunity, hence infant Baptism is normative.
Let me emphasise again, I am not challenging the routine practice of infant Baptism itself, insofar as Baptism concerns gratuitous spiritual effects which the Church claims are indelible, like expunging original sin, opening up the possibility of salvation and the flow of God’s grace.
Imposed life membership without sentient consent can by no means be regarded as indelible or as a divinely ordained spiritual effect.
Church teaching says that from conception, humans are in a state of original sin and if they die unbaptised there is no guarantee they will go to Heaven. For centuries, the teaching claimed that unbaptised, miscarried, aborted and stillborn children went to Hell.
Theologians constructed a hypothesis called Limbo to soften that harsh teaching, though Limbo still was not Heaven. Pope Benedict XVI clarified that Limbo has no basis in Church teaching. In 1980, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – and in 2007, the International Theological Commission – concluded that the best the Church can offer is the hope that God may save such children and admit them to Heaven.
Naturally, parental fear of the uncertain salvific consequences of those children who die unbaptised still has a powerful psychological hold which bolsters the traditional practice of infant Baptism. That practice is the single most important method of recruiting new Catholics.
Eighty-four per cent of the Catholic Church’s 1.4 billion members worldwide were enrolled as full members for life of the Church while infants. There is no concept in canon law of temporary members, provisional members, or of conditional members; there is only automatic lifelong membership voluntarily assumed at Baptism by a small number of previously unbaptised adults but normatively imposed at Baptism on non-sentient infants.
That practice ignores their later rights as maturing children to freely decide for themselves their religious identity, to accept and embrace Church membership or to change religion if that is their choice.
Some jurisdictions (for example Germany, Switzerland and Austria) have laws prohibiting parents from changing the religion of their adolescent children without the child’s consent or opportunity to be heard. They also acknowledge the right of adolescent children to change or exit religion without parental consent.
No such right to change or exit religion is acknowledged in the Church’s canon law. In fact, the opposite is the case, as canon law imposes penalties on those who leave the Catholic Church, even in adulthood.
Attempts to leave the Church or change religion or challenge Church teaching or magisterial authority, constitute canonical crimes of heresy, apostasy, schism. Among the punishments attached to such acts is the much-misunderstood penalty of excommunication, which in fact leaves membership intact but subject to restrictions.
Irish children’s constitutional rights have a potential basis in law to challenge the intrusion into children’s rights of these canon law presumptions which affect the vast majority of school-going children.
A recent decision of the United Kingdom Supreme Court, restricting religious education and collective Christian worship in schools in Northern Ireland on the grounds of interfering with the child’s autonomous rights, has potential to impact similar practices in the Republic of Ireland.
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. 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.
That reality has remained intact despite the UDHR (1948) and despite the UNCRC (1989) to which the Holy See is a State Party, as is Ireland.
Both entities as State Parties to that Convention are obliged through their laws and practices to respect and vindicate a comprehensive list of children’s rights. These include a number which have direct relevance to Church teachings and its claimed authority over the lives of more than 300 million Church members who are children.
Among them: the right not to be discriminated against on grounds of gender; the intellectual human rights to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the right to change religion (which is not specified in the UNCRC but is presumed); freedom of expression, including the right to be heard in all matters affecting the child, the right to know one’s rights, and to the education that facilitates the exercise of one’s rights and freedom from physical violence.
Despite sharp criticism from the Committee on the Rights of the Child, which monitors State Party compliance with the UNCRC, the Catholic Church Catechism still encourages the use of corporal punishment by parents and those in loco parentis.
Dr Mary McAleese, academic civil and canon lawyer, is author of Children’s Rights and Obligations in Canon Law: the Christening Contract (Brill 2019). This is an edited extract from a talk she recently delivered at UCC.