Many people in Ireland collectively let out a sigh today when they learned that former President Mary McAleese has a new book out.
Her book, The Baptism of Bluff, published on October 31, examines baptism in the Catholic Church, particularly whether parents can make religious commitments on behalf of babies who, she claims, “cannot give informed consent”.
Forget Jesus welcoming children in Mark 10:14-15: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” Forget His warning that anyone who does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will not enter it. Mary McAleese apparently knows better.
The most egregious thing about McAleese’s commentary is that it is an attack on families as well as the Church.
It is an attack on parents who choose to baptise their children, rather than simply criticising Church teaching. By her logic, millions of Irish parents who have had their children baptised are guilty of overriding their children’s human rights.
Parents could quite frankly do without being told that bringing their child to be baptised amounts to a human rights violation.
For the avoidance of doubt, our former President is a broken record. In 2018, she accused the Church of being a “primary global carrier of the toxic virus of misogyny”. A year later, she condemned the idea of women priests as “codology”.
Having flogged the horse to death over women priests, she unveiled her latest target in June 2021: infant baptism. In a lecture at Oxford University, she argued that baptising babies and treating them as having accepted lifelong religious obligations raised serious concerns about freedom of conscience and consent.
Her new book repeats the argument. “No one is born a Catholic. One becomes a Catholic by baptism. Most Catholics are baptised as babies,” she writes.
The book’s promotional material claims that Church canon law deems babies to have made baptismal promises binding them to lifelong membership and obedience to Church teaching. It also attacks the practice of renewing baptismal promises at Confirmation, describing it as part of the “baptism bluff”.
McAleese has a doctorate in canon law from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. But what does that matter if she fundamentally misunderstands Catholic teaching?
Baptism has never been understood by the Church as a legal contract forcing lifelong obedience. It is a sacrament: a spiritual rebirth through which a person receives God’s grace and enters the life of Christ. Reducing it to a question of informed consent misses the entire point.
The book’s central complaint is that babies cannot consent to baptism and that nobody can consent on their behalf, supposedly robbing them forever of a vital realm of choice. But parents make decisions for their children every day, long before they are capable of understanding them.
The Irish Daily Mail put the story on its front page today, with comments from Senator Rónán Mullen and Peadar Tóibín TD. Ken O’Flynn of Independent Ireland also defended parents who have their children baptised.
“Parents make decisions for their children every single day – what school they go to. What values they’re raised with. What they eat, what they wear, who minds them. A baby can’t consent to any of it. That’s what being a parent is,” O’Flynn said.
“Leave parents alone. Let them raise their children as they see fit.”
Quite right. Yet, as the Mail noted, the Catholic Communications Office had not responded to its request for comment. I could find no published, formal statement from the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference addressing McAleese’s claims. Nor was there a response from the bishops in January 2026.
Doesn’t the responsibility for explaining and defending Church teaching lie with the Church itself? Why does it so often fall to a tiny handful of Catholic politicians to defend the faith in the public arena?
Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan deserves credit for pushing back against McAleese’s claims that baptism violates children’s rights back in January. But, as a whole, the Catholic bishops need to stop being afraid of McAleese and her broken record.
It is worth remembering that McAleese herself once represented the Church before becoming one of its harshest critics. In 1994, she served on the Catholic Church’s Episcopal Delegation to the New Ireland Forum. In 1996, she was a Church delegate to the North Commission on Contentious Parades.
When she ran for president in 1997, she received support from prominent Catholic clergy, including Fr Brendan Callanan, then head of the Redemptorists. Fr Alec Reid also played a role in suggesting her as a presidential candidate to Fianna Fáil adviser Martin Mansergh.
Now, when she is spouting what Tóibín rightly called “nonsense”, many in the hierarchy seem remarkably quiet.
The Church has always taught that baptism is not merely a symbolic ceremony. It transforms a person spiritually through the power of the Holy Spirit, cleanses original sin and begins a life in Christ.
This is central to the Catholic case for infant baptism. If baptism is a gift of God’s grace, rather than simply a declaration of personal belief, a baby does not need to understand it to receive it. Nor does baptism guarantee that a person will automatically live as a Christian for the rest of their life.
McAleese instead presents infant baptism as a cynical “recruitment tool”, arguing that it violates children’s rights under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child by imposing religious membership and obligations without explicit consent.
But this argument risks misrepresenting the very nature of Christian grace. If baptism is a supernatural gift that transforms a person through God’s grace, why should a child have to wait until they are old enough to understand it? The Church believes baptism is beneficial and important. Withholding it until adulthood would mean denying children a gift that Catholics believe God offers them.
McAleese is entitled to disagree with that teaching. She is not entitled to have her interpretation of Catholicism passed off as the only reasonable one.
I would like to see the bishops forget about turning the other cheek for a moment and take on McAleese with the same sharpness shown by some politicians. At the very least, they should explain clearly why her argument is at odds with Catholic teaching.
The other solution to this McAleese argy-bargy, of course, is to point out that she is free to find another Church.
Baptists and many other evangelical Christians practise believer’s baptism, generally choosing not to baptise babies. Other Protestant denominations have adopted positions more in line with McAleese’s views on women priests and human sexuality. The Church of England, for example, has ordained women priests since 1994, while contraception is generally accepted.
Indeed, a female vicar with bright blue hair and a sparkly collar led an online All Saints’ Day service in the Church of England yesterday.
But the argument that women priests and progressive reforms would reinvigorate Christianity is undermined by the Church of England’s long-term decline in attendance and its diminished place in English public life.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church has attracted younger people searching for traditional teaching, clear doctrine, community and reverent worship. The Church of England’s experience should at least prompt questions about whether progressive reform is the answer to Christianity’s problems.
The Catholic Church in Ireland does not need the reforms McAleese longs for. If the Church of England is anything to go by, they could prove disastrous.
What the Church needs is not another round of concessions to its critics. It needs the courage to defend its teaching, support Catholic families and stand behind parents who want to raise their children in the faith.
Above all, it needs leaders who know what they are for — and who are no longer afraid to say so.