Preist slaps crying baby in the face at baptism

[Rev. Rye]

My one concern with the scenario is that the priest is obviously an older man.  Many factors could have been involved, and something tells me that it was more involuntary than voluntary.

Well, in Catholicism, baptism is generally held to be the one thing keeping the baby from eternal damnation, and, according to the Catechism, "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." They may not have been immediately browbeaten into it, but they were probably conditioned into just going with it.