From his early days within the Apostolic Palace, Pope Leo XIV has demonstrated a welcome attachment to church traditions, including starting the New Year by baptising 20 infants, children of Vatican employees, a long-time practice of his predecessors.
Who would have thought this ritual, a sacrament of salvation and our spiritual inheritance, would provoke an international reaction involving the UN in a campaign against the Holy Father’s action? Yet it has.
Enter the former President of Ireland, now canon lawyer, Mary McAleese.
The internationally-feted former president has identified a human rights scourge she believes needs to be eradicated for all time – not land mines or human trafficking, but infant baptism in the Catholic Church.
In an Irish Times op-ed in January (on the feast day marking the Lord’s baptism, no less), she argued that infant baptism is a key Catholic “recruitment” tool which violates international law and is a “serious, systemic and long-standing restriction on children’s rights” in opposition to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which the Holy See is a signatory.
McAleese has spent much of her post-political life responding to a call for help no one hears but her.
Her quest to abolish the Catholic rite of infant baptism in the name of protecting human rights is a very weird incarnation of ‘a solution in search of a problem’ phenomena, and an acute example of perverse contrarianism pursued for its own sake.
Her weapon of choice for this crusade is international law flavoured by the United Nations, and it is an alarming presage of possible global political activity.
As McAleese takes doctrinal aim at the Apostolic Palace, the incumbents of the world’s other imperial and political palaces are left unchallenged and freely share moralising views on the disruption and breakdown of international norms and traditions.
These pronouncements are becoming more frequent, with regular intonements by Macron from the Élysée, Starmer from Westminster, the Windsors from Buckingham, and, more recently, any Dane who can grab a microphone inside Christiansborg Palace, invoking the “rules-based order” to deliver an international civics lesson – one that often cloaks national interests, or, in the case of the Royals, vanity projects.
The recent law-enforcement action by the United States against Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro has restarted the debate on the legitimacy and standing of international law, particularly its claims of precedence over national laws that are uniquely affirmed by democratic legislatures, constituted through universal franchise.
There is no doubt where McAleese sits on this debate. She is all in for the global framework, untethered to such nuisances as parliamentary oversight.
It’s true that the second half of the 20th century begat the world a scaffold of organisations and practices that supported growth and prosperity, starting with the outcomes of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement. However, as these organisations transmogrified into supranational entities, they assigned to themselves a catalogue of authorising rules, mostly United Nations treaties or covenants.
These treaties often came with cloying titles, affording them uncritical acclaim and acceptance, while still meaningfully giving expression to intent, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention against Torture. As global elites cite these global instruments to decry the jettisoning of norms regarding military or territorial aspirations, they simultaneously weaponise these ‘laws’ to trash the basis of Western civilisation, namely, its Judeo-Christian traditions. Few are more global, or more elite, than Mary McAleese.
She and others seem intent on undermining the very foundations that have the historical bona fides to insulate the world from geopolitical ructions, the decay of institutions, and societal breakdown. She may think she is eradicating rites and rituals by privileging international law above all else, including the transcendent, but her campaign shows little regard for longer-term consequences.
By United Nations’ fiat, McAleese would deny millions of babies, across generations, the rich inheritance of Christianity and its abiding virtues of charity, prudence, justice, and temperance.
Good luck, then, in a world of emerging leaders burdened with naming ceremonies and gender reveal parties. But, of course, McAleese won’t be around to answer for that dystopia.
Dallas McInerney is the CEO of Catholic Schools NSW, he is a former UN intern in the office of H.E Kofi Anan.
