Baptism of Infants

Q. I've heard references to Old Testament circumcision as a contributing reason for the Catholic Church's baptism of infants. Didn't the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ do away with all of those Old Testament principles?

A. Allow me to simply give you the quote of an Anglican priest who certainly said it better than I could. This is Reverend M.F. Sadler from his book, The Second Adam and the New Birth:

“It must ever be borne in mind that Christianity was by no means a new religion. Neither the ideas which it had to deal with, nor the language in which it expressed them, were new. Its germs, and far more than its germs, were contained in the system which it superseded. God was the same; His moral law was the same. There were the same ideas of atonement and sacrifice, only [with the advent of the Messiah] all centered on the Divine Antitype [Christ, the Second Adam].

It was a fundamental principle of the Old Covenant that children should be admitted to its privileges, and a rite was ordained for the purpose. Circumcision has been superseded by Baptism as the form of entrance into the grace of the New Covenant. This latter rite would naturally be administered to infants. It was a basic principle of education within the covenant that infancy was not a disqualification, but a definite qualification for covenant blessings.

If there was to be a difference between the Old Covenant and that which superseded it, with regard to what was in the Old Covenant so fundamental a point, we should certainly have heard of it.”