Ireland may be the only country in the world to have a former president who has a doctorate in canon law from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Mary McAleese—the social activist, lawyer and journalist who served as the president of Ireland from 1997 to 2011—pursued and received her doctorate in her (very active) retirement.

She completed her studies in 2018 but had already published a well-received treatment of the role of collegiality and power-sharing within the church in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. Her most recent book arises from her doctoral research and considers the implications of canon law for children. And it was this topic that she addressed earlier this month in a prominent weekend op-ed in Ireland’s paper of record, the Irish Times. Inciting considerable comment, she argues that baptizing babies “restricts” their human rights.

She presents baptism as a kind of recruitment tool that ignores how children, as they mature, should be able to freely decide their own religious identity. Ms. McAleese notes that canon law acknowledges no right to exit Catholicism: “Attempts to leave the Church or change religion or challenge Church teaching or magisterial authority, constitute canonical crimes of heresy, apostasy, schism.”

In her reading, this represents a systemic restriction on a child’s human rights that conflicts with international treaties that are signed by both the Irish state and the Vatican. All of this rests on the “risible” idea, as Ms. McAleese put it, that an infant can make a promise of any kind. Based on this “fictitious” premise, the institutional church imposes lifelong membership and exerts a “powerful psychological hold” over baptized children, even if they never cross the threshold of a church ever again.

It is important to state that Ms. McAleese is not seeking to attack the sacrament Christians call baptism. She explicitly clarifies that she is “not challenging the routine practice of infant Baptism itself” but does want Christians to consider the “man-made juridic effect” that flows from the “gratuitous spiritual effects” of the practice.

This is a provocative argument. Especially in this age of rage-clicking, social media frenzies, it could be easily chopped up and offered to people as a serving of bitter indignation.

Though she did pledge in 2020 to devote her retirement years to challenging the Catholic hierarchy, Ms. McAleese’s argument is not meant to be trollish. Her concern is that through a kind of institutional blind spot, Christians have ended up harming people who are definitionally vulnerable—“the 300 million church members who are children.” Leaving aside whether the detail of her argument persuades, its form is significantly theological. If it turns out that common practices of the church are inherently discriminatory, the faithful should be concerned.

There is also an important contextual factor at play. Ms. McAleese lives and writes from Ireland, a country where, as recently as the 1970s, more than 90 percent of citizens were regular Mass attendees. In recent years, however, there has been a decline in practice arguably as precipitous as any in the history of the church. The clerical abuse scandals played a decisive role. But as the journalist Derek Scally explains in his excellent account of the recent history of the Irish church, The Best Catholics in the World, “the shallowness of many people’s religious belief allowed prosperity and secularism to erode Catholic Ireland’s foundations with great speed.”

This is the backdrop from which Ms. McAleese makes her argument. For many, the Irish church has operated as a “sacramental conveyor belt,” and the first point of contact with this drive-thru for religious services is baptism.

And yet, more must be said.

Ms. McAleese has been a longstanding champion of ecumenical endeavors. The Rev. Jo Kershaw is a tutor in liturgy at the College of the Resurrection, a monastic seminary for the Church of England. While she read Ms. McAleese’s piece as “coming out of quite a real pastoral concern” for people who could be harmed by a culture that ties the profundity of sacramental initiation in with a tangle of mundane concerns like access to primary school education (almost 90 percent of Irish elementary schools have a Catholic ethos), she found the inter-church implications of her position “distressing.”

As Rev. Kershaw sees it, ecumenical endeavors were advanced because of Vatican II’s “really strong commitment to shared baptism.” That “made a difference in terms of ecumenical engagement.” She worries that Ms. McAleese’s argument skirts the reality that the practice of infant baptism is one of the most important places of common ground upon which the Eastern and Western churches can meet.

She thinks that ecumenical engagement might also offer a constructive path forward. “From an Anglican perspective, I think I would want very much to distinguish between sacramental membership of church, the body of Christ, which is indelible and conveyed by baptism, and membership in the institutional church.”

The German option

As a result of important post-Reformational debates, there are “very easy ways to unambiguously walk away” from the church as a structure in society. Perhaps, Rev. Kershaw suggests, Ms. McAleese’s argument could inspire a conversation about whether the German practice of Kirchenaustritt—a civic process to be formally disassociated from the church—could be adapted in an Irish context?

In Germany, the state directly taxes citizens who are church members and distributes the revenue to the relevant church in lieu of a tithe. While it is impossible in canon law to defect from the church, this civic connection between the church and state establishes a form of public distance. For their part, German bishops have decided to recognize this act of departure by insisting that those who undertake it can no longer receive the sacraments. (The bishops do not really have much choice in the matter. ​​Public repudiation of the church is grounds forlatae sententiae, or automatic, excommunication.)

If the Irish State, recognizing the various ways the Catholic Church is involved in the provision of social services, were to similarly create a civic register for those who wished to no longer be associated with the church, that might address many of the concerns Ms. McAleese raises.

Attending to how other churches practice baptism might also strengthen some of the positions that Ms. McAleese feels are incredible. Rev. Kershaw finds the extensive pastoral notes that accompany the liturgical instructions around baptism in the Church of England instructive. They address many of the sensitivities raised by Ms. McAleese but in a holistic fashion.

It is striking to her that in the Anglican communion having the local parish host the baptism is the first of the five elements of Christian initiation. The local congregation commits to a central role in the fulfillment of the baptismal promises and, while a baby cannot commit to anything, it is not unreasonable that “godparents are speaking on behalf of the child,” since the anthropological reality is that so much of our early lives are entirely dependent on the care of those around us.

“None of us choose our communities” as babies, Rev. Kershaw says. We are born into a social context that has a dramatic influence on our moral vision, aesthetic preferences and view of the world: “Baptism, at its best, is this sort of joyous welcoming of the child into a wider community that is taking the child seriously as a full human being.”

Rev. Kershaw uses the example of a boy born and raised in the United Kingdom but who, as a small child, lived briefly in the United States. He had not realized that he had become a U.S. citizen by derivation after his mother became naturalized during that time—just one more way in which identity is indelibly shaped by the decisions of those who love us and whom we love.

Ms. McAleese sees these ties that bind in terms of the “formidable restrictions on my inalienable intellectual human rights.” But for the acclaimed De Paul University moral theologian, William T. Cavanaugh, baptism has a potent political edge that is all too easily overlooked in the kinds of critiques that Ms. McAleese levies.

“Theoretically, at least, the idea is that you are baptized into this global body and that means that your national identities, your tribal identities, your ethnic identity and all your other identities are relativized,” Mr. Cavanaugh tells America. He grants that there are many cases where this has not been followed through on by the faithful—Ms. McAleese’s original home of Northern Ireland is one such case—but the existence of this bond is a “recognition of the universality of our humanity.”

From this perspective, baptism is an obligation to live the values of universal fraternity and solidarity that are so central to the Gospel. He appreciates that Ms. McAleese’s argument presses Christians to see baptism not merely as an institutional alignment but the beginning of a journey where we “invest in our faith.” But he has concerns about whether that is the key message that the church needs to underline at this time.

“There are two aspects to baptism. One is that God chooses you, and the other is you choose God. They’re both right,” Mr. Cavanaugh says. “But it seems to me that the priority has to be theologically that God chooses you, before you choose God. And infant baptism is a recognition of that fact.”

Informed by the work of historian Sophia Rosenfeld, he argues that the Western world is marked today by “the idea that we are sovereign choosers.”

As Mr. Cavanaugh’s teacher, the theologian Stanley Hauerwas, famously described it, our cultural moment is one in which we are told to believe that we have no story except the story we chose when we had no story. This commitment to shaping our lives around conscious choice—“sentient consent” to use Ms. McAleese’s terms—is “an ideology of choice, but it’s not reality,” Mr. Cavanaugh said.

Exactly because “we are marinated in market ideology and learn to think ourselves as these autonomous choosers (when we’re clearly not that at all),” it is important that the “idea that what we need to hold up is the idea that God chooses us,” Mr. Cavanaugh argues. “God is not a consumer item that we choose.”

Ms. McAleese’s argument might be a rich opportunity to consider the ways in which the “conveyor belt” view of sacramental formation is ripe for replacement. Her warning about how baptism can inculcate discrimination in a society should be considered.

But when Mr. Cavanaugh proposes the priority of God’s choice, what is being described is a context where the human rights of the child can be respected. When done right, baptism tells a child—before they can even put a word to this force—that they are loved and that they will be loved to the end of time and beyond. It declares that a power higher than the state is invested in their flourishing. It assures them that they belong to a family wider than their kin or the borders of a nation-state.

To make that promise a reality, the bind may be more on the congregation than the baby. As Rev. Kershaw puts it: “It is the congregation that is agreeing to do this when they promise to care for the child, to keep praying and to keep engaging.”