James, being a Catholic is something very permanent. Even if you’ve stopped believing (for now, and God willing you will find your way back to the faith soon), you are still Catholic. And with that comes both great responsibility and great opportunity–or great failure.
If you do not accept and live up to your responsibilities as a Catholic, your failure has more ‘weight’ than the failings of a non-Catholic, because you as a Catholic have the fullness of faith and thus the opportunity to be, to do, the fullness of Christian life.
If a person only had, for example, a small garden, he or she could still grow enough food to feed themselves and others, because they might be very skilled, use every bit of soil, etc. . . but how much easier it would be for such a person to have 2 or 4 or 10 times more land.
Catholics are like the people with lots of garden space. And if they neglect that garden, then they have failed not just themselves but the people they could have helped feed from that garden. . .and since they have a lot of space, they fail a lot more people.
So your child being baptized involves much more than a ‘nice day’ and a nod to the grandma (as a grandmother I appreciate your thinking of dear old mom but dear old mom doesn’t just want the ceremony, she wants you to LIVE THE PROMISE). It involves your being willing to raise your child AS a Catholic with all of the rights and responsibilities. It involves not just making HIM live up to those, but YOU having to live up to it as well.
Think very long and carefully, James. WHY have you stopped practicing? What do you think Catholicism is --which you have rejected–and are you absolutely sure what you reject is really Catholicism? IOW, do you truly KNOW your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and do you really understand that your rejection of Catholicism is a rejection of the One who died on the cross for you, me, and all humanity, to set us free? Have you gotten somehow confused into the kind of relativistic, indifferentism common to so many young ‘educated’ people who think life is just about being ‘nice’, having ‘nice things’, and that nothing else matters either because there IS nothing else or that if --God forbid–the Christians ARE right, that God will give you a pass because it isn’t YOUR fault He didn’t make Himself clear so you could ‘do the right thing’ in life?
Do you want your wife, your children, and especially this little one, to go through life like a ship without a rudder, swayed only by whoever they want to believe to do whatever they want to do?
When your children were little, did you just throw items on a table and let them ‘graze’, figuring they would be able to ‘learn for themselves’ how to eat healthful nutritious meals in order to grow their bodies and brains to the fullest peak? You didn’t, did you? You had to make a lot of effort to start them out right. You had to go back to the basics and then ‘build’. You didn’t let them walk away just eating junk food. You didn’t do the ‘easy’ way.
WHY would you then think that your child’s relationship with God could be just thrown at them years from now, when you’d never made sure that they started with ‘the basics’ and had to work through even with things they didn’t like but which were necessary and good for them (lima beans)? Do you really think that teens and young adults like you are going to be willing to ‘start from scratch’ when it is just so EASY to let things go and ignore God?
Please, for your sake and your families’, go back to square one, like you did with having to let your children learn to walk, talk, eat, etc. Work on that relationship with God. . .it is the most important one you will ever have and it will be the very best thing you could EVER do for your family.
God bless you all.
