Page "Infant baptism" Paragraph 16

The Roman Catholic Church considers baptism, even for an infant, so important that " parents are obliged to see that their infants are baptised within the first few weeks " and, " if the infant is in danger of death, it is to be baptised without any delay.

" It declares: " The practice of infant Baptism is an immemorial tradition of the Church.

There is explicit testimony to this practice from the second century on, and it is quite possible that, from the beginning of the apostolic preaching, when whole ' households ' received baptism, infants may also have been baptized.

" It notes that, " when the first direct evidence of infant Baptism appears in the second century, it is never presented as an innovation ," that 2nd-century Irenaeus treated baptism of infants as a matter of course, and that, " at a Synod of African Bishops, St. Cyprian stated that ' God's mercy and grace should not be refused to anyone born ', and the Synod, recalling that'all human beings ' are ' equal ', whatever be ' their size or age ', declared it lawful to baptize children ' by the second or third day after their birth '.

" In the 17th and 18th centuries, many infants were baptised on the day of their birth as in the cases of Francoise-Athenais, Marquise de Montespan, Jeanne Du Barry and Marie Anne de Cupis de Camargo.

Infant baptism is seen as showing very clearly that salvation is an unmerited favour from God, not the fruit of human effort.

" 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 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.