advice on baptism with very reluctant husband/father

[newmom1]

From your title, you tried to make it sound like the conflict was with your husband. If you don’t believe in what the Church teaches, I can only pray that the Holy Ghost turns your heart.

Congratulations on being a new mommy!

Thanks very much! It was originally about a conflict with my husband. But as we talked and he explained his reasoning, I came to see that I actually agreed with him. He wasn’t opposed to our daughter being Catholic one day, or even to exposing her to various religious and secular options as a child (including, of course, Catholicism). He just didn’t want to irrevocably make her a Catholic as an infant before she could decide on her own. And I’ve come to believe that he is right on that point. From my own perspective, I was always (as the original post demonstrates) somewhat ambivalent about wanting a full Catholic baptism. What I really wanted was some sort of formal recognition ceremony for the baby, and since I was raised Catholic and my whole extended family is Catholic, I just sort of assumed that a Catholic baptism was the default and only way to make that happen. Once I started thinking more broadly about it, I realized that we could have a baptism without necessarily enrolling our child in the Church.

Peace!

 

[FonsBonitatis]

…who get to still have a huge baptism party (which is what my mother really wanted after all).

This makes me so very sad … and motivated. We have so much work left to do in terms of evangelizing Catholics, and not just Sacramentalizing them. OP, you’re helping me to try to get more involved at my parish.

 

[FonsBonitatis]

He just didn’t want to irrevocably make her a Catholic as an infant before she could decide on her own.

This is a bit like saying you’re going to wait until your child is an adult so that they can decide for themselves whether or not to take education seriously. In the meantime, you’re just going to have parties and eat lollipops and chocolate every day until she’s 18. Even pretending such a choice exists is simply to raise a child incapable of having a good career.

You’ve already forced a decision on her: that Catholicism is not true, that it need not be payed attention to, and that the only value it has is as some sort of a cultural artifact which may or may not be interesting enough to partake in should they get into a religion kick for a time. It will take a tremendous amount of grace to even open her up to the *possibility *that those perceptions, which she was raised with from infancy, might not be as well-thought out as she had always assumed.

There is no such thing as giving a child a neutral view on this: one either views religion as being true, or one sees it as being untrue. Social science is very clear that raising children “to decide on their own” is really just raising them as atheists, sometimes as ones who like to play religion now and again in “liberal” churches.

So yes, I am encouraging you to be intellectually honest in all of this, and to be very clear which side you’ve chosen for your daughter.

 

[newmom1]

This is a bit like saying you’re going to wait until your child is an adult so that they can decide for themselves whether or not to take education seriously: even pretending such a choice exists is simply to raise a child incapable of having a good career.

You’ve already forced a decision on her: that Catholicism is not true, that it need not be payed attention to, and that the only value it has is as some sort of a cultural artifact which may or may not be interesting enough to partake in should they get into a religion kick for a time.

There is no such thing as giving a child a neutral view on this: one either views religion as being true, or one sees it as being untrue. Social science is very clear that raising children “to decide on their own” is really just raising them as atheists, sometimes as ones who like to play religion now and again in “liberal” churches.

So yes, I am encouraging you to be intellectually honest in all of this, and to be very clear which side you’ve chosen for your daughter.

OK, let’s talk intellectual honesty here, dude! Without even realizing it, you are doing a fantastic job of making my husband’s case for him. You are conceding that true Catholicism can have no appeal for an adult unless it was forced down their throat and imposed as a child. If an ideology and belief structure can flourish and grow only if it is indoctrinated at birth, then it does not deserve to flourish. If you truly believe that Catholicism requires childhood indoctrination, then you have guaranteed that Catholicism will die in America and the western world. So yes, I do favor giving my child a choice of whether she wants to subscribe to the moral and theological tenets of Catholicism, or any other religion or secular belief system. Do you favor enrolling children in a political party as well? Or is that somehow different in your narrow world view?

Moreover, as an aside, equating religion to “education vel non” is a self-defeating and ridiculous proposition. It’s not the same as “education” writ large, it’s the same as, maybe, a subset of education like 18th century british literature, for example. So stop the “not giving your children religion is the same as not educating or clothing or feeding them.” It’s an absurd argument that discrets the speaker.