Feast of Saint Thomas, Apostle
We don’t delay citizenship for underage children until they are mature enough to decide for themselves. They receive citizenship as a gift and as a result of their parents’ decisions. Likewise, membership in a family is not something that is withheld until a child reaches adulthood and makes his own decision as to which family fits him best. It is just something the child is born into and then stuck with. For the most part, citizenship and family membership are unhesitatingly imposed on children from their earliest years.
Baptism is, or ought to be, the same. Consider what St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians: “You are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God” (Eph 2:19). The text is not explicitly calling for infant baptism, but it does explain that Christianity is a kind of citizenship and a kind of family membership. We deduce from this, and from the witness of the fathers of the Church, the value of infant baptism.
This is important for practitioners of Ignatian spirituality because it helps us better apply the rules for thinking with the Church that are included in The Spiritual Exercises. It also helps us when we are on retreat: much of our identity is simply given to us. We seek to understand and appreciate the good gifts that we have been given, and to recognize and free ourselves, with God’s help, from what is bad.