Have the rules changed about baptism?

[Miriam1947]

A customer in my store has read that parents should wait to baptize children until they are older and not baptize them as infants.

Is this true? I thought that baptism was the new covenant and replaced circumcision. Please help, she’s going to call me in a couple of days for an answer.

 

[Fr.Charles_Grondin]

That individual is incorrect. The Church continues to encourage parents to have their children baptized as soon as is reasonably possible:

Catechism of the Catholic Church

1250 Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth in Baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called. The sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation is particularly manifest in infant Baptism. The Church and the parents would deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confer Baptism shortly after birth.

Code of Canon law

Can. 867 §1. Parents are obliged to take care that infants are baptized in the first few weeks; as soon as possible after the birth or even before it, they are to go to the pastor to request the sacrament for their child and to be prepared properly for it.

§2. An infant in danger of death is to be baptized without delay.