Child abuse. . .

I read a while back that a fairly prominent Roman Catholic recently argued in the Irish Times against a new label for an old abuse -- those baptized as infant baptisms.  She is not exactly the silent type and this former president of Ireland and canon lawyer, Mary McAleese, has chosen to use her bully pulpit to challenge the practice of infant baptism -- not on theological grounds but as an abuse against children.  She declared infant baptism to be “a long-standing, systemic and overlooked severe restriction on children’s rights with regard to religion.” Hmmm.  Amid all the things that threaten children today, infant baptism is one that needs to be called out.  Really? 

Who worries about infant baptism -- besides those who fear that the practice without the catechesis is dangerous?  Apparently those who can ignore all the other threats and abuses children suffer in our modern age but have infant baptism stuck in their craw.  Amazing how so-called Christians can invent more societal sin and guilt.  Would that infant baptism had such a profound meaning that those who were given new the new birth of water and the Spirit had to grapple with the meaning of it all the rest of their lives.  That is not the case.  Of all things that could be made forgettable, infant baptism must surely top the list.  Every day the numbers of those baptized as infant shrinks by the false assumption that religion is a matter of choice more than Godly act and declaration.  Every day the numbers of children shrink as declining birth rates and sky high rates of abortion diminish the potential for infant baptism even to be practiced.  Every day the world erupts in violence somewhere.  Every day new forms of perversion are invented to turn a gift of God into a curse and a bane.  Every day old diseases once thought eradicated come back and new diseases loom over the lives of the children who are born.  Every day a world that has little moral compass left finds new ways to exploit children for sexual purpose.  But apparently the worst of them all is infant baptism.

It won't be long before someone like her begins to challenge the idea of life itself, suggesting that the worst abuse of children is to allow them to be born at all.  That is how far our world has been shifted off its axis and how deeply skewed the values that once heralded children as a blessing form the Lord and those whom we cared for in the sacred trust given to us from God Himself.  But that is the outcome of where things are headed.  It seems like some think we should apologize to children for allowing them to be conceived and, having been conceived, allowing them to be born at all.  In the last month we observed Life Sunday with its solemn remembrance of the legalization of child murder.  It is clear that more than abortion, the whole value assigned to life and the character of the stewardship of life given to parents is under assault today.  

It would seem, according to Ms. McAleese and those of her opinion, that it is any kind of abuse to pass onto your children any of your ideas, morals, beliefs, etc.  For if baptism is under assault, then by what right does anyone teach their children anything at home or in church?  Indeed, it would seem that only those in the elite of education have any right to teach our children or promote anything to the mind and heart of the child.  If that is the case, that is much more dangerous than a cranky Irish lady complaining about her own baptism some 7 1/2 decades ago.  If this is where we are as a culture, then God save us from the almighties who inhabit the halls of academia because their ideas have proven more inherently dangerous than the promise of forgiveness and new life born of water and the Word could ever be.  How sad it is that someone can actually write about the abuse of infant baptism without even mentioning how routinely we put to death the infants in the womb -- making that seem normal while infant baptism the exception.  Really, you cannot make this stuff up.