Calling the Baptism Bluff: A Faith Memoir

By Mary McAleese

No-one is born a Catholic. One becomes a Catholic by Baptism. Most Catholics are baptised as babies. Man-made 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, 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 to 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. It has led to a lazy catechesis of obligation rather than a dynamic catechesis of invitation. It needs to be emphatically called and here, it is.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1786053101
• ISBN13: 9781786053107
• Release Date: December 2026
• Publisher: Red Stripe Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.