Home ⋅ Published Books ⋅ The Baptism Bluff: Human Rights and the Canon Law of Baptism

The Baptism Bluff: Human Rights and the Canon Law of Baptism
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By: Mary McAleese
Publisher: Orpen Press
Published: October 2026
Pages: 280
Categories: Autobiography, Non-Fiction, Religion
Language: English
Available as: Paperback
On sale at:
ISBN-13: 9781786053107
ASIN: 1786053101

No one is born a Catholic. One becomes a Catholic by baptism. Most Catholics are baptised as babies. Manmade Church canon law deems them to have made baptismal promises which bind them to forever membership and which oblige them to be obedient to Church teaching in their public civic and private religious lives. The sacrament of Confirmation, also usually undertaken as minors, requires them to ‘renew their baptismal promises’, a glaring and largely unchallenged part of the baptism bluff. The Church is structured on the presumption that the pope and bishops, collectively known as the authors of the teaching Magisterium of the Church, have the right to regulate and control (including through penal sanctions), much of the life and especially the thinking of members of the Catholic Church. That presumption requires the Magisterium to ignore contemporary understanding of the inalienable human rights of the individual to freedom of conscience, opinion, expression and religion, and freedom to change religion. It requires all Catholics to overlook the fact that babies cannot give informed consent to promises at baptism and no one can consent on their behalf, robbing them forever of such a vital realm of choice. The baptismal bluff is a foundational, existential building block of the magisterial control infrastructure now facing an historic breakdown in trust. The Baptism Bluff is the story of one member’s journey deep into that presumption. It is a journey from the passive acceptance expected of Church members to a studied questioning of its origin, credibility, and the legitimacy of the laws which flow from it. It is a journey away from an infantilised religious sensibility, superficial and reliant on fear, and conformity, to an unforced spiritual conviction; from an excluding, inauthentic God to a God whose embrace is absolute inclusion, absolute love. Ironically it is not a journey away from the Church but the opposite, a journey into the overlooked deviations, deceptions and vanities which skewed its mission but which if reset and reformed could leave it redeemable still.

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