The Catholic News Agency portal (January 21, 2026) reports on former Irish president Mary McAleese’s accusation that infant baptism violates children’s rights, presenting responses from conciliar clergy who defend the practice while omitting its supernatural purpose. Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan and Fr. Owen Gorman employ naturalistic arguments about parental choice and “good start in life,” while convert Mahon McCann correctly identifies the incompatibility of human rights frameworks with sacramental theology yet remains entrenched in neo-church structures. The article culminates in the blasphemous spectacle of antipope Leo XIV administering invalid baptisms in the Sistine Chapel.
Naturalism Masquerading as Sacramental Defense
The conciliar clergy’s defense of baptism reveals its capitulation to Enlightenment anthropocentrism. Bishop Cullinan’s comparison of baptism to “good food” and “medical care” reduces the sacrament to merely natural goods, directly contradicting Pope Pius XII’s teaching that “baptism incorporates us into the Mystical Body of Christ, makes us members of the Church” (Mystici Corporis Christi, 22). This naturalistic reduction echoes the condemned proposition: “The Church is incapable of effectively defending evangelical ethics because it steadfastly adheres to its views which cannot be reconciled with modern progress” (Holy Office, Lamentabili Sane, 63).
Fr. Gorman compounds this error by describing baptism as enabling children “to have life and have it to the full” – a phrase stripped of its supernatural meaning and reduced to temporal fulfillment. The Council of Trent dogmatically defined that baptism “effects the remission of all punishment due to sin” (Session V, Decree on Original Sin), yet neither cleric mentions the eradication of original sin or the bestowal of sanctifying grace. Their silence confirms St. Pius X’s warning that Modernists “empty doctrine of all supernatural element” (Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 37).
McAleese’s Heretical Presuppositions Unchallenged
Mary McAleese’s assertion that baptismal promises are “fictitious” constitutes formal heresy against the sacramental character imprinted on the soul. As the Council of Florence decreed: “The character is a spiritual and indelible mark… hence baptism is not repeated” (Bull Exultate Deo). The neo-church’s failure to condemn this heresy demonstrates its complicity with religious indifferentism condemned by Pius IX: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true” (Syllabus of Errors, 15).
McCann’s otherwise correct rejection of human rights frameworks as incompatible with Catholic teleology remains incomplete without affirming the extra Ecclesiam nulla salus doctrine. Vatican II’s declaration on religious freedom (Dignitatis Humanae) directly contradicts the Syllabus proposition: “The Church has not the power of defining dogmatically that the religion of the Catholic Church is the only true religion” (21). By not condemning McAleese’s religious indifferentism ex cathedra, the conciliar clergy betray their adherence to the modernist heresy.
Antipapal Sacrilege in the Sistine Chapel
The article’s grotesque centerpiece – antipope Leo XIV’s simulated baptisms – embodies the conciliar sect’s sacramental invalidity. As the true Church teaches, “No one can give what he does not have” (nemo dat quod non habet). A manifest heretic cannot hold papal office (St. Robert Bellarmine, De Romano Pontifice II.30), rendering Leo XIV’s actions sacrilegious theatre. The photograph of this antipope administering false sacraments in the Sistine Chapel – once consecrated to Catholic worship, now desecrated as a Masonic meeting hall – fulfills Our Lady of La Salette’s prophecy: “Rome will lose the faith and become the seat of the Antichrist.”
Omission of Eschatological Reality
The most damning silence permeating both McAleese’s attack and the neo-clergy’s defense concerns baptism’s essential purpose: salvation from eternal damnation. As the Council of Trent anathematized those who deny that “little children… are unable to be endowed with the righteousness of God through the sacrament of baptism” (Session V, Canon 4), the true Church has always taught that unbaptized infants cannot enter Heaven (Pius VI, Bull Auctorem Fidei). The article’s exclusive focus on temporal “rights” and “choices” constitutes apostasy from the Gospel mandate: “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5).
The conciliar clergy’s naturalistic defense and McAleese’s secularist attack jointly constitute a diabolical disorientation foretold in Pius X’s encyclical against Modernism: “They substitute for the divine magisterium a certain idle striving after universal brotherhood” (Pascendi, 39). Until Ireland’s Catholics reject both the conciliar sect and secular humanism to return to the unchanging Faith, their baptismal promises remain unfulfilled – not “fictitious” as McAleese claims, but tragically abandoned in the wasteland of apostasy.
Source:
Catholics in Ireland reject ex-president’s claim that baptism violates children’s rights (catholicnewsagency.com)
Date: 21.01.2026