Forcible baptism made the Church’s later conversion mission impossible

Evidence

It cannot be said that the Church responded adequately to the challenge with which it was faced. Perhaps that is not surprising. By imposing on unwilling converts the self-contradictory nonsense of a forcible baptism and never subsequently facing up to that fundamental error, still less recanting it, the Church effectively made its own task impossible. The task of the parish clergy, conscious as they will have been that no substantial progress had been made over the course of several generations, must have been quite disheartening. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1105

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Direct supporting material for ‘On Sacrifice’ — forcible conversion as a self-defeating spiritual violence that forecloses genuine belief.
• DEEPTHINKING: The structural contradiction of coercive sacrament: the Church rendered its own goal unreachable by the very act meant to achieve it — a dense, non-obvious paradox worth sitting with.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1105