AN OBJECTION:
Mary Mc Aleese's arguments about baptism breaching human rights are wrong.
She makes a simple mistake.
She treats Church rules as if they were the same as forcing people to believe. They are not the same. Church rules are for people who are voluntarily part of a group. Just like a gym. A golf club. Or a school's code of behaviour.
Being baptised and subject to canon law does not mean your freedom of religion or conscience is taken away. Church law has no power outside the Church. The Church considering someone baptised as a member does not breach human rights. It does not make a person believe anything or force them to follow canon law. The Church cannot punish you under civil law or stop you living your life. It can only set rules for people who want to take part in Church life and who willingly join the group (parental consent is sufficient for membership as is the case with any group a child joins). That is not coercion or a human rights violation.
Dignitatis Humanae teaches faith cannot be forced. That principle does not disappear once someone is baptised. The Church expects its members to take its beliefs seriously but believes faith is given freely. Expecting belief is not the same as forcing belief. People are free to question or leave the faith with no breach of freedom of conscience.
Claims that baptism traps someone in lifelong compulsory obligations exaggerate reality. People leave the Church all the time. If someone chooses to leave, nothing happens in their everyday life. The Church may still consider them baptised. But that does not stop them exercising freedom of conscience. The Church considering someone a member does not take away civil rights or freedom to believe what they want. I have loads of friends who have left the faith I’ve asked them and they are totally unaware of what consequences they are meant to be suffering from or the psychological pressure they should be facing.
Penalties like excommunication only affect participation in Church activities. Every organisation does this. If you reject a group’s core beliefs, the group can limit your involvement. That is how freedom of association works. Just like a schools behaviour policy, parents can sign on behalf of a child promising to obey the rules around behaviour. Else there’ll be consequences often not admitted to the school. Is this a breach of a child’s civil rights? I mean it puts behavioural obligations on a child who cannot consent.
There is no contradiction between the Church defending religious freedom and having internal rules. Human rights law does not require churches to be neutral about their beliefs.
Religious freedom includes the right to define membership and rules. People are then free to choose to join or not. Parents can make decisions for children until they are old enough to choose themselves (like the behaviour policy). When old enough children are free to choose themselves.
The UNCRC does not oppose baptism. Children just need the freedom to make their own choice when they are old enough, which they do in practice. Research shows most parents baptise children out of tradition, personal belief, and cultural norms. Research suggests that fear of children dying unbaptised is not a major factor in parents choice of baptism.
Baptism works like a school music program. Parents sign their child up. Children are expected to follow rules as long as they participate. As they grow, they can choose to follow or not. They can eventually leave and still be free. They’ll always be considered as having been a member of the music school. There are no real punishments in real life. Being a practicing member does not take away rights or freedom but comes with certain obligations.
It is almost unimaginable that someone who does not even believe in Catholicism would spend so much time critiquing it. It is almost as if some atheists have nothing better to focus on than exaggerating things about other religions. As someone with significant lived experience of Catholicism none of what you reported actually happens. This is the disconnect that exists between lived experience and relying on external sources. If someone truly had concerns about human rights they would look at real cases of coercion or abuse, not make claims about voluntary participation in a faith.
To summarise, baptism does not contradict UNCRC.
-Parents are allowed to raise children in their religion and make decisions while they are too young.
-Children have the right to grow up in their family culture and traditions.
-At baptism, parents and godparents make the promises, not the baby. They promised to raise their child in their faith similar to abiding by a school behaviour policy or agree to agree programme. Children decide at Confirmation when they can freely choose.
-The Church can make its own internal rules like any club for people who choose to join.
-The Church does not use legal force or coercion and respects freedom of conscience.
-People are free to leave or ignore the Church as adults with no civil consequences.
-Being considered a member by the Church does not violate anyone’s rights. Personal beliefs remain your own.
-There are no human rights consequences for leaving or not believing.
-Human rights laws protect from coercion and persecution, not from parents raising children in their religion or being part of a religious group, as long as freedom of conscience is respected.
REPLY:
Ultimately this issue is not about Mary McAleese’s or any other canon lawyer's, or any theologian’s views on Canon Law. It is about the human rights of children, as enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and how those rights are interpreted and overseen by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.
The Holy See has committed to binding treaty obligations to (a) implement in domestic law and practice the rights that are in the Convention; (b) respect and ensure the rights for every child within its jurisdiction; and (c) periodically report to the UN CRC Committee on how it is implementing the treaty. It has reneged on those commitments, and is as usual trying to be a church when it suits and a quasi-state when it suits it. It wants the rights of a quasi-state without the attached obligations in has signed up to.
Under the terms of the Convention the Holy See should by now have submitted seven periodic reports to the UN Committee. So far it has submitted only two, the last in 2011. At that stage it was at least engaging with the committee, albeit defensively. It accepted that the committee could examine how canon law and Church practice affected children. And it did not deny that its treaty obligations had relevance beyond the Vatican City alone.
On a parallel track, states can enter reservations about their accession, and the UN Committee can accept them if they are not incompatible with the object and purpose of the Convention. In this case, the Holy See entered reservations on family planning; the primary and inalienable rights of parents including regarding religion and education; and what it called the particular nature of the Vatican City State and the sources of its objective law.
In 2014, the UN Committee concluded that the Holy See’s reservations undermine the core treaty principle of full recognition of children as subjects of rights. It recommended that the Holy See withdraw all its reservations, and ensure the Convention has precedence over internal laws and regulations, including in particular Canon Law. It also expressed concern about the Holy See’s restrictive interpretation of children’s rights as undermining the rights and duties of parents.
The Holy See responded that it reserves to itself the exclusive competence to interpret its internal fundamental norms, and that it (the Holy See) lacks capacity or legal obligation to impose the Convention’s principles on Catholic institutions outside the Vatican City state (despite signing up the treaty as the Holy See and not the Vatican State). It also restated its parental primacy reservation verbatim, reinforcing its refusal to accept the UN Committee’s position on this.
The Committee on the Rights of the Child has not heard from the Holy See since 2014. If the Holy See was confident that its interpretation of these issues was compatible with the UN Convention, it could easily have made those arguments. Instead it has retreated into an ‘angels on the head of a pin’ argument about its obligations, and has for over a decade refused to engage seriously with the Committee that oversees the treaty they have signed up to.
That is the disconnect that Mary McAleese has raised. As she puts it: “The ongoing failure of theology, canon law and secular human rights law to intellectually interact in a way which explores the structure of the christening contract in the light of our developing understanding of the human rights of the individual, leaves the Church open to accusations of double-standards when it preaches respect for human rights to the world at large but fails to engage with them in its own internal sphere.”
MY POINTS:
A child has the right not to be treated as something to be fixed by baptism. Baptism is not the same as choosing vaccination for your child. Vaccination is shown to be good for the child. A parent taking baptism seriously is not well or superstitious. Parents would object if say they had to put the child through a prolonged ritual to get rid of the alleged influence coming from Satan and original sin. The Church would vanish soon if God introduced that. The real motive is to make the child "different" and "apart" from other children. The talk about baptism being desired for the child for it brings healing from sin is thin.
The claim that your baby baptism marks you as belonging to Christ is odd. Sacramental theology allows for somebody going through a rite but getting no benefit or grace from it until later. For example, somebody who hates God gets the sacrament of confirmation yes but it has no effect until he starts to turn to God. Out of respect for a baby, Jesus should not let the baptism take effect until the child accepts it. He might make an exception for a child that dies in infancy.
A child who grows up to disengage with the church is not necessarily going to find that easy. The obedient Catholics will stigmatize. There will be consequences perhaps with marriage etc. The Church is clear that failure to raise your children in the faith is harming them spiritually - and otherwise. It warns that good intentions cannot change that. Such a passive-aggressive doctrine shows real disdain for those who have come to think Catholicism is merely human and has no authority from God.
The claim that church rules only apply if you are practicing as a Catholic is nonsense. We all know that the Church says a fallen-away Catholic has a duty to attend Sunday Mass, confess once a year and so on.
Biblically and in the Christian tradition, the secular teaching that makes a clear distinction between Church and state is condemned. If Jesus really is king and the church his kingdom then his view matters, not the state's. In principle, this opens the road for invoking civil penalties against fallen away Catholics and heretics. That road existed up until five minutes ago. Our modern freedoms are down to religious doubters not believers.
Jesus did not give any definite approval for infant baptism.
Theologically, it supposedly puts the child in the covenant with God as circumcision supposedly used to do. A rite that suggests God could use circumcision, perhaps female circumcision as well, but only happened to chose water baptism is hardly morally neutral or benign.