Former Irish president Mary McAleese criticized infant baptism and the Catholic Church this week, while supporting the deadly abuse of children in the womb through abortion.
Speaking to the Irish Times, McAleese claimed infant baptism imposes “obligations on people who are only two weeks old.”
A radical abortion activist, the political leader has repeatedly attacked the Catholic Church and others who believe unborn babies should have a right to life. Ironically, she expressed horror at the harmless act of baptizing of an infant with water while celebrating abortion – the violent destruction of infants in the womb.
Echoing professional atheist Richard Dawkins, who has argued that labeling children as possessors of religious beliefs is “always a form of child abuse,” McAleese said that babies baptized in the Catholic Church are “infant conscripts who are held to lifelong obligations of obedience.”
Early Baptism breaches fundamental human rights, she said, adding that you cannot impose obligations on little children and then “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.”
McAleese said that the current model of Baptism “worked for many centuries because people didn’t understand that they had the right to say no, the right to walk away.”
Last week, McAleese also blasted Catholic Bishop Kevin Doran of Elphin who urged Catholics to attend confession if they voted to repeal the country’s pro-life Eighth Amendment.
The Irish Independent reports McAleese flouted the bishop’s urging and openly touted her vote to allow the legalized killing of unborn babies in Ireland. She made the statements at a weekend conference organized by the Catholic lay group We Are Church Ireland in Dublin.
Committed Catholics have been some of the strongest advocates for unborn babies in Ireland and across the world. They continue to fight tirelessly to save babies from the violence and destruction of abortion.
For decades, the Eighth Amendment protected unborn babies and mothers equally in Ireland by recognizing that both are valuable human beings who deserve a right to life. More than 100,000 Irish unborn babies and mothers were spared from the pain and death of abortion.
Ireland also was one of the safest places in the world for pregnant mothers and their babies, with one of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world.
Now, the fear is Ireland’s abortion law will mirror Britain’s, where one in every five pregnancies there ends in abortion each year. In Britain, abortion is permitted until 24 weeks of pregnancy.
