Was reading some books about the history of Confirmation in the Patriarchate of Rome. Not it would follow that if children were to not be given the sacraments of initiation as infants, that the number of Catholics who fall-away later in life would decrease, as the total number of Catholics would decrease, and the only neophytes would be of adult age, or close to it.
Still, if it is necessary, as Baptists claim(?), for people to make a deliberate decision to become Christian before being initiated, then is there a case to be made, in light of the number of Catholics who fall away from the practice of the faith in their adolescence and young adulthood, that Catholics (and Apostolic Christians in general) should refrain from initiating their children until they've attained the age of reason or after? Or are we merely seeing the effects of generations of poorly-catechized Catholics who've never been properly introduced to the practice of prayer and Christian spirituality and made them their own just doing with their own children what their parents did?
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