For People Who Want To Leave The Church

Sarky

And queue memes of Overly Attached Girlfriend with Pope Benny's face in 3... 2... 1...

Peregrinus

Mark Hamill wrote: »

How do you know? The reported membership of the church is just a number, names aren't attached. How do you know who is and isn't being regarded as a member?

If there are no names attached, then no particular person is being claimed as a member. Obviously.

Look, you take the baptismal data, and then you adjust it for deaths, you adjust it for migrations, you adjust it for leavers, etc, etc. To do this, it is not necessary to identify the individuals who have died, the individuals who have migrated, the individuals who have left, etc, etc. You don’t need their identities; just an estimate of their numbers.

The resulting figure is an estimate of the number of Catholics, and no claim is being made that any particular person is, or is not, a Catholic. Estimating the size of a population is not the same as, and does not require, identifying the individual members of the population.

Mark Hamill wrote: »

I think the key word is "belonging". As in, you cannot stop belonging to the church after getting baptised: As Dades quoted from the ACTUS FORMALIS DEFECTIONIS AB ECCLESIA CATHOLICA:

” the sacramental bond of belonging to the Body of Christ that is the Church, conferred by the baptismal character, is an ontological and permanent bond which is not lost by reason of any act or fact of defection.”

Um, you’re managing to ignore the fact that that text goes to the trouble of defining what they mean by “belong”, and the key word is “ontological”. “Belonging to the Body of Christ that is the church” is explicitly stated to be an ontological bond. Membership of an organization, as commonly conceived, is not an ontological bond. Hence, this is not a claim that all baptized people are members of the Catholic church.

(If you want to insist that it is, you will need to address the “Ian Paisley” counter-example already mentioned. As a baptized person, he has an “ontological and permanent bond” of “belonging to the Body of Christ that is the church”. But he is not a member of the Catholic church, and not claimed as such by the church.)

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Really? Odd then that it makes articles about "CHURCH MEMBERSHIP AND PASTORAL CO-RESPONSIBILITY". I think you are mistaking church members complete lack of say in the running of the church as them not being counted.

The problem with your "participate" semantics is that you can be a member of something even if you don't participate (eg a gym), as long as you satisfy the joining criteria.

Indeed you can. But the church is not a gym, any more than it’s a golf club. The “membership criteria” for the Catholic church, if you must, include being in communion, and if you’re not in communion, you don’t satisfy the criteria. You’re not a Catholic, your “ontological and permanent bond” notwithstanding.

You may not like, or be convinced by, a distinction between “membership” and “ontological bond”. You may think that a claim of an “ontological bond” is tantamount to a claim of membership. But - no offence - what you think is irrelevant. The allegation is that the Catholic church claims that people who have left the church are still Catholics, and that allegation is only sustained if it is shown that the Catholic church sees no distinction between having an “ontological bond” and being a church member. And they fairly clearly do.

Peregrinus

krudler wrote: »

So basically leaving Catholic Church is the equivalent of breaking up with someone who then still considers you their boyfriend.

great..

Dear God, it's like talking to a field of turnips.

No. The analogy you want is breaking up with your boyfriend and then insisting that you are still a couple because he hasn't acknowledged the breakup in writing in the form that you think he should, because you haven't asked him to, because someone has told you he won't.

Dades

Okay, just trying to solidify some points made on this thread:

- You cannot be unbaptised because an irreversible ontological link is (allegedly) made.
- The baptism record cannot be amended, if in fact you were baptised.
- That said, baptism (and said claimed ontological link) is not enough to keep you a member of the church forever.
- However, at time of writing there doesn't exist a formal method to resign your membership of the church.

Peregrinus wrote:

You may not like, or be convinced by, a distinction between “membership” and “ontological bond”. You may think that a claim of an “ontological bond” is tantamount to a claim of membership. But - no offence - what you think is irrelevant. The allegation is that the Catholic church claims that people who have left the church are still Catholics, and that allegation is only sustained if it is shown that the Catholic church sees no distinction between having an “ontological bond” and being a church member. And they fairly clearly do.

Apologies from this particular turnip, but I missed where the distinction is made in church doctrine between those who have an "ontological bond" and those who they consider to be members. I have only seen you make it, and act condescendingly towards those who don't take your unsubstantiated word for it.

By removing the option to allow people to officially leave, it suggests to me that the church don't in fact share this distinction, or at the very most, is intent on making it as difficult or convoluted as possible to leave (with the possible exception of converting to another faith.)

In replying please try and lower yourself to the intelligence levels of your audience, or perhaps consider that turnips may think differently to other vegetables.

Mark Hamill

Peregrinus wrote: »

If there are no names attached, then no particular person is being claimed as a member. Obviously.

Look, you take the baptismal data, and then you adjust it for deaths, you adjust it for migrations, you adjust it for leavers, etc, etc. To do this, it is not necessary to identify the individuals who have died, the individuals who have migrated, the individuals who have left, etc, etc. You don’t need their identities; just an estimate of their numbers.

The resulting figure is an estimate of the number of Catholics, and no claim is being made that any particular person is, or is not, a Catholic. Estimating the size of a population is not the same as, and does not require, identifying the individual members of the population.

If there are no names attached, then any particular person can be claimed, obviously.
And, obviously, if someone particular satisfies the initial criteria, ie baptised, and doesn't fall under any criteria that results in them not being counted, ie died or migrated (leaving doesn't count because there is no way to leave the church, especially as they will no longer even add the note to the baptism register), then they will always be counted. Anonymity on the records make this easier, not harder. Hell, anonymity in the records means the numbers can be made up.

Peregrinus wrote: »

Um, you’re managing to ignore the fact that that text goes to the trouble of defining what they mean by “belong”, and the key word is “ontological”. “Belonging to the Body of Christ that is the church” is explicitly stated to be an ontological bond. Membership of an organization, as commonly conceived, is not an ontological bond. Hence, this is not a claim that all baptized people are members of the Catholic church.

(If you want to insist that it is, you will need to address the “Ian Paisley” counter-example already mentioned. As a baptized person, he has an “ontological and permanent bond” of “belonging to the Body of Christ that is the church”. But he is not a member of the Catholic church, and not claimed as such by the church.)

There are no objective rules on what an organisation must have as its membership rituals or how it should see its bonds. And churches are not commonly conceived organisations, though organisations they are.

I already debunked your Paisley argument, as you simply can't say he is not being counted because the numbers are anonymous.

Peregrinus wrote: »

The allegation is that the Catholic church claims that people who have left the church are still Catholics, and that allegation is only sustained if it is shown that the Catholic church sees no distinction between having an “ontological bond” and being a church member. And they fairly clearly do.

Do they? Where do they say that? Because if they do say that, it really calls into question what , if anything, they mean by ontological bond"?
What exactly does an "ontological bond to the church" amount to if that bond has nothing to do with membership, belief or allegiance? In what way does an atheist, baptised as a child, belong to the church?

Peregrinus

Dades wrote: »

Okay, just trying to solidify some points made on this thread:

- You cannot be unbaptised because an irreversible ontological link is (allegedly) made.
- The baptism record cannot be amended, if in fact you were baptised.
- That said, baptism (and said claimed ontological link) is not enough to keep you a member of the church forever.
- However, at time of writing there doesn't exist a formal method to resign your membership of the church.

Apologies from this particular turnip, but I missed where the distinction is made in church doctrine between those who have an "ontological bond" and those who they consider to be members. I have only seen you make it, and act condescendingly towards those who don't take your unsubstantiated word for it.

By removing the option to allow people to officially leave, it suggests to me that the church don't in fact share this distinction, or at the very most, is intent on making it as difficult or convoluted as possible to leave (with the possible exception of converting to another faith.)

In replying please try and lower yourself to the intelligence levels of your audience, or perhaps consider that turnips may think differently to other vegetables.

Fair enough. I apologise for coming across as condescending. I’m spending way more time in this thread than is good for me.

But, in my defence, if I was condescending with my “turnips” remark, it was a response to a post from krudler which was itself fairly condescending.

And, again in my defence, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to claim that what I am saying is just my “unsubstantiated word”. I’ve referred several time to Ian Paisley. He stands for several hundred million sacramentally baptized Christians who are not Catholics, and who are not regarded, claimed or counted as Catholics by the Catholic church. If it’s true that, in the Catholic view, “baptism” = “permanent membership of the Catholic church”, then there are several hundred million fairly serious anomalies that need to be explained. And none of the proponents of that claim seem willing to engage with this.

In the same vein, you mention the “formal defection” procedure which was terminated a few years ago. If it is true that the Catholic church considers leaving to be impossible, then how are we to explain the fact that the Catholic church ever provided such a procedure? This discussion usually starts from, or fairly early on gets to, a lamentation that the Catholic church “closed down” the facility to leave some years ago. (It’s in post #1 of this thread.) It seems to me that you can believe that or you can believe that the Catholic church considers leaving to be intrinsically impossible but you cannot, rationally, believe both of these things at the same time. And if you choose to believe the latter then you have to be willing to offer some account of why the formal defection procedure was ever provided. Again, I don’t see anyone rushing to engage with this fairly obvious problem.

And, while the “formal defection” procedure was removed from canon law some years ago, a couple of minutes googling shows that the current code of canon law still contains numerous references to people defecting from the church. No particular procedure is required any more, but the code clearly recognizes that people can and do still defect. Again, those who claim that the Catholic church has stopped people leaving, and/or that it considers leaving to be inherently impossible, need to be willing to account for this.

All these anomalies disappear, though, once you accept that “baptism” does not equal “permanent membership”. So I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that the view I’m offering is unsubstantiated. It accords with, and explains, the observed evidence. The contrary view, however, is inconsistent with the observed evidence, and requires a degree of cognitive dissonance to maintain it.

And, while I understand people’s frustration at not getting the neat documentary evidence of departure that the formal defection procedure used to provide, I really don’t think it’s fair to say that “the church is intent on making it as difficult or convoluted as possible to leave”. Having a formal procedure that you have to go through is a barrier to leaving, and when that procedure involves corresponding with your bishop and having satisfy him as to your intention, it’s a fairly significant barrier. Most people who’ve lost interest in the church are understandably reluctant to do this. Dropping that procedure looks to me like the removal of a barrier, not the creation of one. (It was dropped precisely because so few leavers went through with it.)

The present position is that there are no barriers at all to leaving - no procedures that must be gone through, no notifications that must be made, no consents or acknowledgements that must be obtained, nothing. I don’t see that there could possibly be any greater freedom to leave than there currently is.

The corollary of this - the inevitable corollary, I think - is that there is often no evidence (at least, no evidence generated or authenticated by the church) that someone has left. And I do understand how someone might want evidence of that kind. What people who lament the demise of the “formal defection” procedure want is not really freedom to leave. They already have full freedom to leave; they’re willing to trade some of that freedom in return for evidence of leaving.

That may be a reasonable stance, but the people taking it should recognize that it is their stance. It’s distinctly unhelpful to present their cause as a crusade for freedom. And I suggest they also need to recognize that, if a formal defection procedure is reinstated, the likely result is that most leavers will not bother with it, and so will be counted as Catholics when in fact they are not. In other words, calling for a formal leaving procedure is calling for a policy which will tend to result in Catholics being over-counted, and you cannot, with consistency, object that the church is over-counting members for its own nefarious purposes, and at the same time demand the introduction of procedures which will tend to increase the over-counting of church members.

Peregrinus

Mark Hamill wrote: »

If there are no names attached, then any particular person can be claimed, obviously.

Any particular person can be claimed, but no particular person is being claimed by the mere publication of the estimate.

The allegation being made here is not that the Catholic church can claim Ian Paisley and Mark Hamill (assuming he was ever baptized) as members; of course it can claim them. So can the Fianna Fail party.

The allegation is that the Catholic church does claim Ian Paisly and Mark Hamill as members, and includes them in its estimates. And I await evidence in either case.

Mark Hamill wrote: »

I already debunked your Paisley argument, as you simply can't say he is not being counted because the numbers are anonymous.

No. But we can say that he’s not being counted because the basis for counting him would be his baptism, and exactly the same basis applies to hundreds of millions of other baptized persons, and the aggregate figures published by the church clearly do not include them. And those who claim that “baptism” = “permanent membership” and that the church count is conducted on that basis, need to be able to account for this anomaly.

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Do they? Where do they say that? Because if they do say that, it really calls into question what , if anything, they mean by ontological bond"?
What exactly does an "ontological bond to the church" amount to if that bond has nothing to do with membership, belief or allegiance? In what way does an atheist, baptised as a child, belong to the church?

For the purpose of my argument, we don’t need to say what ontological bond means; it’s enough to show that it doesn not mean “membership such as results in inclusion in the church’s estimates of its members”. And we show this by observing that there are 2.1 billion (adherents.com) or 2.3 billion (Wikipedia) Christians in the world, most or all of them baptised, while the Catholic church claims only 1.2 billion members. This is not something which can be accounted for by a rounding adjustment.

The claim that the Catholic church considers baptism to create permanent church membership and compiles its membership figures accordingly, doesn’t stand up to the most basic scrutiny. No person of ordinary intelligence can believe it. You really don’t need to get to grips with theology, ecclesiology or ontology to debunk it.

Dades

Peregrinus wrote: »

Fair enough. I apologise for coming across as condescending. I’m spending way more time in this thread than is good for me.

You and me both. And then we wonder why we get so many "why do you bother threads?" popping up.

Peregrinus wrote: »

And, again in my defence, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to claim that what I am saying is just my “unsubstantiated word”. I’ve referred several time to Ian Paisley. He stands for several hundred million sacramentally baptized Christians who are not Catholics, and who are not regarded, claimed or counted as Catholics by the Catholic church. If it’s true that, in the Catholic view, “baptism” = “permanent membership of the Catholic church”, then there are several hundred million fairly serious anomalies that need to be explained. And none of the proponents of that claim seem willing to engage with this.

Are catholic and [protestant] bapitisms the exact same? The same incantations? Can a catholic priest perform a protestant one and vice-versa? If not, then this argument is surely a red herring. The catholics believe something supernatural happens - I very much doubt they believe the same thing happens when not done by one of their own with no similar "intent" on anyone's part.

Peregrinus wrote: »

In the same vein, you mention the “formal defection” procedure which was terminated a few years ago. If it is true that the Catholic church considers leaving to be impossible, then how are we to explain the fact that the Catholic church ever provided such a procedure? This discussion usually starts from, or fairly early on gets to, a lamentation that the Catholic church “closed down” the facility to leave some years ago. (It’s in post #1 of this thread.) It seems to me that you can believe that or you can believe that the Catholic church considers leaving to be intrinsically impossible but you cannot, rationally, believe both of these things at the same time. And if you choose to believe the latter then you have to be willing to offer some account of why the formal defection procedure was ever provided. Again, I don’t see anyone rushing to engage with this fairly obvious problem.

The church can and do reinterpret doctrine. Limbo was done away with a few years back. It was my understanding that they had a "rethink" on whether they could validly say you had left.

Peregrinus wrote: »

And, while the “formal defection” procedure was removed from canon law some years ago, a couple of minutes googling shows that the current code of canon law still contains numerous references to people defecting from the church. No particular procedure is required any more, but the code clearly recognizes that people can and do still defect. Again, those who claim that the Catholic church has stopped people leaving, and/or that it considers leaving to be inherently impossible, need to be willing to account for this.

In what way are these people defecting if there's no formal method?

Peregrinus wrote: »

All these anomalies disappear, though, once you accept that “baptism” does not equal “permanent membership”. So I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that the view I’m offering is unsubstantiated. It accords with, and explains, the observed evidence. The contrary view, however, is inconsistent with the observed evidence, and requires a degree of cognitive dissonance to maintain it.

No, it requires dissatisfaction with the evidence for the premise you're putting forward. I've outlined above why I feel it is still unsubstantiated. I really am open to the idea - I'm just unconvinced. It's still my view that behind all the smoke & mirrors and rhetoric of the church they believe you are one of them after baptism, forever, unless you can get them to formally recognise you are not - which it seems they won't.

It should restate though - I don't think this matters a jot. What the church thinks, and the nonsense numbers both they and the census produce make it all irrelevant.

Peregrinus wrote: »

And, while I understand people’s frustration at not getting the neat documentary evidence of departure that the formal defection procedure used to provide, I really don’t think it’s fair to say that “the church is intent on making it as difficult or convoluted as possible to leave”. Having a formal procedure that you have to go through is a barrier to leaving, and when that procedure involves corresponding with your bishop and having satisfy him as to your intention, it’s a fairly significant barrier. Most people who’ve lost interest in the church are understandably reluctant to do this. Dropping that procedure looks to me like the removal of a barrier, not the creation of one. (It was dropped precisely because so few leavers went through with it.)

The present position is that there are no barriers at all to leaving - no procedures that must be gone through, no notifications that must be made, no consents or acknowledgements that must be obtained, nothing. I don’t see that there could possibly be any greater freedom to leave than there currently is.

I can't believe you're suggesting that removing the only official exit is not a barrier to leaving!

You suggest that they dropped the procedure because so few leavers wanted it. Seem peculiar then that they waited until such time as the worst scandals hit the church and various interest groups organised websites etc encouraging people to formally leave. Surely they seem to have pulled the plug at a time when requests were becoming more frequent? It's a move so cynical you'd have been shocked if it wasn't the church pulling it.

Peregrinus wrote: »

The corollary of this - the inevitable corollary, I think - is that there is often no evidence (at least, no evidence generated or authenticated by the church) that someone has left. And I do understand how someone might want evidence of that kind. What people who lament the demise of the “formal defection” procedure want is not really freedom to leave. They already have full freedom to leave; they’re willing to trade some of that freedom in return for evidence of leaving.

That may be a reasonable stance, but the people taking it should recognize that it is their stance. It’s distinctly unhelpful to present their cause as a crusade for freedom. And I suggest they also need to recognize that, if a formal defection procedure is reinstated, the likely result is that most leavers will not bother with it, and so will be counted as Catholics when in fact they are not. In other words, calling for a formal leaving procedure is calling for a policy which will tend to result in Catholics being over-counted, and you cannot, with consistency, object that the church is over-counting members for its own nefarious purposes, and at the same time demand the introduction of procedures which will tend to increase the over-counting of church members.

As mentioned, I'm not really interested in the end results - I don't trust the church to do anything except look after their own agenda. I'm only here to dispute - or look for evidence - that the church is actually willing to allow people leave in a meaningful way.

Banbh

Sorry to crash in so late in the debate but I have been reading and I'm with Peri on this one - and I liked the turnip remark.

When you leave, you leave. It's up to you.

The debate on the numbers claimed as members of the Catholic Church is a separate issue.

And Dades "allow people leave in a meaningful way"?
I left in a meaningful way - I just stopped turning up.

oldrnwisr

Peregrinus wrote: »

When I checked this before, I found that the Irish estimate accords fairly well with Catholic self-identification as disclosed in censuses, etc, conducted by the state. If we could be bothered, we could examine other countries to see whether the same holds up, or whether a pattern of either over-estimating or under-estimating vis-à-vis Catholic self-identification emerges. Unless they do that or something similar, however, anyone asserting that the numbers are either overestimates or underestimates is guilty of practicing pre-enlightnment science; pontificating without bothering to examine the available evidence.


Indeed, if by “faithful” you mean “coming to mass on Sunday”.

I just want to come back on this point briefly because I feel its important in the context of the overall debate.

If the estimate of Catholics in Ireland, as part of the 1.1 billion catholics worldwide, agrees with census data then the 1.1 billion is a measure of catholic self-identification. This is the bit I've got a problem with.

You see, for me, catholic as a label for someone is not subject to self-identification. Christian, sure, as long as you believe in Jesus then you can call yourself a Christian but I can't call myself catholic anymore than I can call myself Asian. It's not a one true scotsman problem.

There are established criteria to identify Catholics, such as the five precepts of the church, particularly, mass attendance and obedience to the magisterium.

I get the feeling, however, that the argument you're making is what Dara O'Briain described:

"Catholicism, the stickiest, most adhesive religion in the world. You could join the Taliban and you'd probably be regarded as a bad catholic."

If you don't go to mass, don't adhere to crucial church teachings such as birth control, abortion etc., then in what way are you actually a catholic?


EDIT: A bit of Dara, to get my point across, but also for laughs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9u5eTXyWg8

Dades

Banbh wrote: »

When you leave, you leave. It's up to you.

...

And Dades "allow people leave in a meaningful way"?
I left in a meaningful way - I just stopped turning up.

With respect, I'm not sure you've got the context of this discussion. I'm only arguing against Peregrinus' contention that the church consider people who have decided to turn their back on the church as ex-members, or even to have left at all. It's my contention they claim you as one of their own until the good Lord takes you, and that their recent removal of an official exit policy is evidence of this.

Like you, it doesn't bother me, but I won't let that stand in the way of a strenuous debate.

Mark Hamill

Peregrinus wrote: »

For the purpose of my argument, we don’t need to say what ontological bond means; it’s enough to show that it doesn not mean “membership such as results in inclusion in the church’s estimates of its members”. And we show this by observing that there are 2.1 billion (adherents.com) or 2.3 billion (Wikipedia) Christians in the world, most or all of them baptised, while the Catholic church claims only 1.2 billion members. This is not something which can be accounted for by a rounding adjustment.

Your other points hinge on this argument, don't they?
Do I really need to point out that the catholic church is not going to call you a member of the catholic church if you get baptised into a different christian church? You are going to need to do a whole lot better than this. Maybe you should start with what "ontological bond" means.

expectationlost

Dades wrote: »

Okay, just trying to solidify some points made on this thread:

- You cannot be unbaptised because an irreversible ontological link is (allegedly) made.
- The baptism record cannot be amended, if in fact you were baptised.
-

but you can annotate it.

Dades

expectationlost wrote: »

but you can annotate it.

You can indeed, and in the unlikely event that a distant relative looks at it (in this era of information sharing) they can see you requested it. But that's the only implication of annotation, afaic.

expectationlost

Dades wrote: »

You can indeed, and in the unlikely event that a distant relative looks at it (in this era of information sharing) they can see you requested it. But that's the only implication of annotation, afaic.

the implication is that YOU ask for it to be annotated and it was.

Dades

Uh, right.

Peregrinus

Dades wrote: »

Are catholic and [protestant] bapitisms the exact same? The same incantations? Can a catholic priest perform a protestant one and vice-versa? If not, then this argument is surely a red herring. The catholics believe something supernatural happens - I very much doubt they believe the same thing happens when not done by one of their own with no similar "intent" on anyone's part.

As far as the Catholic church is concerned, there’s no such thing as “catholic baptism” versus “protestant baptism”. There’s just baptism. You don’t need a Catholic – or even a Christian – minister for a valid sacramental baptism. Ian Paisley, for example, is completely validly baptised, and whatever the irreversible spiritual consequences of baptism are, he has ‘em.

Dades wrote: »

The church can and do reinterpret doctrine. Limbo was done away with a few years back. It was my understanding that they had a "rethink" on whether they could validly say you had left.

If a belief that the church used to let you leave but no longer does rests on church teaching on the effects of baptism having changed, then that’s a belief based on speculation, not a belief based on evidence, unless you actually do the spadework and dig up evidence of the change.

And you can spare yourself the trouble. Whatever about other teachings, I’m pretty sure this one hasn’t changed lately. Since, like, forever the Catholic church’s teaching has been (a) the spiritual effects of baptism are indelible, and (b) you don’t need a Catholic or a Christian priest (or indeed layperson) to baptise you; anyone can do it.

Dades wrote: »

In what way are these people defecting if there's no formal method?

Mostly, by a simple act of will, followed by withdrawal, inaction. They cease to have any external involvement in the church and, internally, they cease to think of themselves as part of the church or as having anything to do with the church, and in many cases this is because they realise they don’t or can’t believe what the church teaches.

(I’m talking here about people who leave the Catholic church for unbelief, obviously, not people who leave it for another Christian or non-Christian religious tradition.)

The thing is, though, although that rather quiet series of actions is effective to leave the Catholic church, nobody’s going to know you’ve left the church unless you say or do something a bit more public. In particular, the church authorities won’t know. Which does mean, I agree, that church estimates of the number of leavers are necessarily a bit rubbery. But I don’t see how it can be otherwise; we cannot force people to proclaim themselves as defectors, and a brief experiment with a procedure for doing so was a lamentable failure.

Dades wrote: »

No, it requires dissatisfaction with the evidence for the premise you're putting forward. I've outlined above why I feel it is still unsubstantiated. I really am open to the idea - I'm just unconvinced. It's still my view that behind all the smoke & mirrors and rhetoric of the church they believe you are one of them after baptism, forever, unless you can get them to formally recognise you are not - which it seems they won't.

But your view is difficult to reconcile with the evidence, though, isn’t it? There has been explicit canonical recognition of the reality, and the consequences, of defection since, like, forever – it was there before the formal procedure was introduced, and it’s still there now that the formal procedure was abandoned. Was that a cunning smokescreen?

Even when the formal procedure was in existence, it didn’t effect your departure from the church; it evidenced it (in the way that a birth, death and marriage certificates don’t effect births, deaths and marriages, but merely evidence them). I honestly can’t see any foundation at all for your suspicion that the church doesn’t really think you’ve left until they agree you’ve left. If your belief is correct, the corollary is that for centuries the Catholic church made canonical provision for defections which could not arise. Why would they do that?

Dades wrote: »

It should restate though - I don't think this matters a jot. What the church thinks, and the nonsense numbers both they and the census produce make it all irrelevant.

Um. No offence, Dades, but if we understand church membership as a relationship between the individual and the church community, then (at the risk of oversimplifying slightly) the church estimate gives the church’s take on how many people are in that relationship, and the census gives information from individuals, or from people very close to them, on how many individuals are in that relationship, then for all their errors both of those figures are way more authoritative than anything you’ve got, aren’t they? In calling them both “nonsense” you are claiming that you are in a better position to know how many members of the Catholic church there are than (a) the church or (b) Catholics. Which I think begs the question, what’s your definition of church membership? What data have you got, or what method do you employ to back up your claims about the numbers who do, or do not, fit that definition? And what is it about your definition which makes it more authoritative than the definitions used by the people who are actually in this relationship? Why are their figures “nonsense”, and yours presumably reliable, rather than the other way around?

Dades wrote: »

I can't believe you're suggesting that removing the only official exit is not a barrier to leaving!

If there is an “only official exit” then quite obviously that is a barrier to leaving – particularly if the “only official exit” requires you to enter into one-to-one correspondence with church leaders. An idiot in a hurry can see that most people who move from belief to unbelief will have zero interest in going through with this, and absolutely no motivation to. But if, as you see it, it’s the “only official exit” then those people remain Catholics. So, yes, having an “only official exit” that people are generally reluctant to go through will tend to reduce the numbers exiting; it’s very much a barrier to leaving. How can you not see this?

As it happens, it never was the “only official exit”, in the sense that you never had to go through it to leave. You went through it, if you wanted to, in order to clarify that you had left, in order to ensure that certain provisions of canon law regarding the marriage of Catholics would not be treated as applying to you; it had no other canonical significance. I think it was countmeout, ironically, who did most to promote the view that this was the “official exit”.

Dades wrote: »

You suggest that they dropped the procedure because so few leavers wanted it. Seem peculiar then that they waited until such time as the worst scandals hit the church and various interest groups organised websites etc encouraging people to formally leave. Surely they seem to have pulled the plug at a time when requests were becoming more frequent? It's a move so cynical you'd have been shocked if it wasn't the church pulling it.

Your inner conspiracy theorist is showing, Dades!

We know from the countmeout website that 531 people used their service to e-mail a formal defection from the Catholic church during the five years of its operation. That’s a bit over a hundred a year, or an average of between four and five persons per year per Catholic diocese in Ireland.

Now, of course, it’s possible that other people were nutting their own way through the process without availing of the countmeout.ie service. Still, even if we assume that as many again were doing so, that’s still only a bit over two hundred people a year throughout Ireland.

Do you seriously think that only 200 people a year leave the communion of the Catholic church in Ireland? No, me neither.

The reality, as you, I and – more to the point – the Catholic church all know is that many more people leave the church every year, and the great bulk of them are not motivated to fill out forms, send letters to bishops, etc, etc. They couldn’t be arsed. And I don’t see that Ireland would be a special case; this would be true everywhere.

Even if the rate at which people were using the website was picking up in later years – and that’s unknown – it was clearly still the case that only a small fraction of leavers were going through the “only official exit”. If the church was concerned to conceal or minimise perceived numbers of defectors, it would have been in their interests to leave the formal defection procedure in place and point to the small numbers availing of it.

We know that the reason was actually the opposite. Canon lawyers at the coalface mostly deal in marriage cases – annulment petitions, and so forth. And they were reporting significant numbers of cases in which people who had in fact left, but hadn’t gone through the procedure (and, in most cases, had never heard of it, and had never made any enquiries which might have led them to it) were being treated for canon law purposes as Catholics (remember, the canon law marriage rules were the only thing that formal defection had any relevance to) with bizarre results which were at variance with reality.

Dades wrote: »

As mentioned, I'm not really interested in the end results - I don't trust the church to do anything except look after their own agenda. I'm only here to dispute - or look for evidence - that the church is actually willing to allow people leave in a meaningful way.

But you’re presenting as someone who won’t take ‘yes’ for an answer! Your preconceptions have led you to the bizarre position that “having a required exit mechanism which demands individual correspondence with your bishop or someone on his staff” = “not a barrier to leaving”, while “having no requirements at all” = “putting barriers in the way of leaving”.

Earlier in your post you said that “behind all the smoke & mirrors and rhetoric of the church they believe you are one of them after baptism, forever, unless you can get them to formally recognise you are not.” What I suggest is that that’s not their belief; it’s yours – and you assume, or are anxious to believe, that they share it. And, viewign everything through the lens of that assumption, you arrive at a topsy-turvy view in which church officials behaving consistently with their own understanding of church membership are seen as duplicitous because their behaviour is not what it would be if they had your understanding, and church officials who dismantle onerous exit prodedures that leavers don't want to follow are seen to be erecting barriers because, if they had your beliefs, they would see those procedures as necessary if leaving is to be possible.

They don't share your view, Dades. If you think about it, you'll see there's no reason why they should, and no real basis for your suspicion that they do.

Dades

Peregrinus, we're going around in circles. I'll let someone else have a go. I just want to clarify my comments re the statistics.

I don't trust the church numbers because they only have accurate records of baptised people and scant record of people who do not consider themselves catholic. And the census results include 1.2 million people under 18 who, as far as I'm concerned have little or no choice in what religion their parents put them down as.

No, I don't have my own stats, but just like I can be utterly skeptical of religion without having a explanation of the universe, I can be skeptical of statistics without having my own.

eyescreamcone

...Just resign!

Mark Hamill

Peregrinus wrote: »

As far as the Catholic church is concerned, there’s no such thing as “catholic baptism” versus “protestant baptism”. There’s just baptism. You don’t need a Catholic – or even a Christian – minister for a valid sacramental baptism. Ian Paisley, for example, is completely validly baptised, and whatever the irreversible spiritual consequences of baptism are, he has ‘em.

Do you have any evidence for this? While I am under the impression that anyone can perform a catholic baptism, the baptism will only be considered catholic if the person is intentionally baptised into the catholic church.

Paisley was baptised, but not into the catholic church and hence wouldn't (presumably) be counted.

Peregrinus

Dades wrote: »

Peregrinus, we're going around in circles. I'll let someone else have a go. I just want to clarify my comments re the statistics.

I don't trust the church numbers because they only have accurate records of baptised people and scant record of people who do not consider themselves catholic. And the census results include 1.2 million people under 18 who, as far as I'm concerned have little or no choice in what religion their parents put them down as.

Of course. But parents are much better positioned to know their children's religious affiliation than you are, and consequently it is rational to accord more credence to their information than to your suspicions.

Or, more briefly - yes, the census figures are a bit rubbery, but they're still better than anything you've got, and claims that they are "nonsense" tell me a lot more about the position of the person making the
claim than they do about the position of the people counted in the census.

Peregrinus

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Do you have any evidence for this? While I am under the impression that anyone can perform a catholic baptism, the baptism will only be considered catholic if the person is intentionally baptised into the catholic church.

Paisley was baptised, but not into the catholic church and hence wouldn't (presumably) be counted.

Where are you getting this "Catholic baptism" notion? Anyone can perform a baptism and it can be fully sacramentally valid, etc, and have all the indelible spiritual effects of baptism. Ian Paisley is in this situation. So, I suspect, are you.

The thing is, those "indelible spiritual effects" do not include membership of the Catholic church. Church membership requires not just baptism - an event - but also communion - an ongoing relationship. Paisley has never had this, so he has never been a Catholic church member - not because of any lack in his baptism, but because of a lack of communion. When Ian Paisley finally sees the light and decides to submit joyfully to Rome, he won't be rebaptised. He'll be received into communion.

If you're baptised by a Catholic priest in the Catholic church, the context of your baptism points to you entering into/being raised in a relationship of communion which makes you a church member. But that relationship is not one of the "indelible spiritual effects" of baptism; it can end at any time and, if and when you end it, you won't be a church member any more.

pauldla

Peregrinus wrote: »

Where are you getting this "Catholic baptism" notion? Anyone can perform a baptism and it can be fully sacramentally valid, etc, and have all the indelible spiritual effects of baptism. Ian Paisley is in this situation. So, I suspect, are you.

The thing is, those "indelible spiritual effects" do not include membership of the Catholic church. Church membership requires not just baptism - an event - but also communion - an ongoing relationship. Paisley has never had this, so he has never been a Catholic church member - not because of any lack in his baptism, but because of a lack of communion. When Ian Paisley finally sees the light and decides to submit joyfully to Rome, he won't be rebaptised. He'll be received into communion.

If you're baptised by a Catholic priest in the Catholic church, the context of your baptism points to you entering into/being raised in a relationship of communion which makes you a church member. But that relationship is not one of the "indelible spiritual effects" of baptism; it can end at any time and, if and when you end it, you won't be a church member any more.

But some branches of Christianity do re-baptise, don't they? Would it not therefore be correct to say that there are different forms, and different ideas, of baptism, and that the term 'Catholic baptism' is thus a valid one?

Peregrinus

pauldla wrote: »

But some branches of Christianity do re-baptise, don't they? Would it not therefore be correct to say that there are different forms, and different ideas, of baptism, and that the term 'Catholic baptism' is thus a valid one?

Well, there's a Catholic notion of baptism, certainly. But the Catholic notion of baptism is that there is no sacramental difference between a baptism conducted by a Catholic priest and one conducted by an Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, etc minister.

In the context of whether the Catholic church regards someone as a member on account of his having been baptised, obviously the Catholic understanding of the substance and signficance of baptism is the only one that matters, since the Catholic church's position on the effects of baptism is going to be determined by the Catholic church's notion of baptism. And the Catholic church's notion of baptism is that its sacramental validity and spiritual effects do not depend at all, to any extent, on whether or not it is celebrated by a Catholic priest.

Dades

Peregrinus wrote: »

Of course. But parents are much better positioned to know their children's religious affiliation than you are, and consequently it is rational to accord more credence to their information than to your suspicions.

I don't subscribe to the notion of "children's religious affiliation". The further down you get towards toddlers and infants the more meaningless it becomes. You might as well let them vote in elections, too, with the parent deciding what party they belong to.

Peregrinus wrote: »

Or, more briefly - yes, the census figures are a bit rubbery, but they're still better than anything you've got

So we're agreed they're rubbery, and you've chosen to ignore where I've explained why I don't need to provide alternative statistics to accompany my opinion. Like atheism, it comes about from seeing flaws in other propositions, rather than producing your own.

That said, if you want a snapshot of the "youth" of today, Boards.ie is a good place to start. This poll is interesting.

Peregrinus wrote: »

and claims that they are "nonsense" tell me a lot more about the position of the person making the claim than they do about the position of the people counted in the census

Really? We're at that level now are we?

Branch Meeting

I fully understand that like any other act, e.g. doing the leaving cert, joining the scouts etc., it cannot be "undone" once it has actually been done. To me that's not the real issue at all here, and I can't see the point arguing about it.

How do I get a note added to the register, beside my original baptism entry, as other people have done ?

Surely if some people have already been accommodated this way, then the principle of precedent and equality would dictate that this option should be open to other people as well ?

krudler

eyescreamcone wrote: »

...Just resign!

Baptised as an infant with no choice= stuck for life.

given job as god's spokeperson on earth=too tired for this I'm off :pac:

Mark Hamill

Peregrinus wrote: »

Where are you getting this "Catholic baptism" notion? Anyone can perform a baptism and it can be fully sacramentally valid, etc, and have all the indelible spiritual effects of baptism. Ian Paisley is in this situation. So, I suspect, are you.

Again, do you have any evidence for this? Yes, baptism can be performed by anyone, but the catholic church is obviously only going to care about baptisms that imply the catholic church. Paisleys baptism never implied the RCC, so why would it care about his baptism?
Saying that a non-catholic baptism is valid is not the same thing as saying that non-catholic baptisms are the same as catholic baptisms.

Peregrinus wrote: »

The thing is, those "indelible spiritual effects" do not include membership of the Catholic church.

You may want to tell the church that (from the catechism of the RCC):
"Through Baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ, are incorporated into the Church and made sharers in her mission"

Peregrinus wrote: »

Church membership requires not just baptism - an event - but also communion - an ongoing relationship.

You would think then that if the church was being consistent that they would be the loudest decriers of the inaccuracy of Ireland's census, given the large difference between declared catholics and church attendance.

Peregrinus wrote: »

If you're baptised by a Catholic priest in the Catholic church, the context of your baptism points to you entering into/being raised in a relationship of communion which makes you a church member. But that relationship is not one of the "indelible spiritual effects" of baptism; it can end at any time and, if and when you end it, you won't be a church member any more.

How will the church acknowledge this, if they dont have any way for you to declare this to them (seeing as they don't accept defections anymore)?

Mark Hamill

Peregrinus wrote: »

Or, more briefly - yes, the census figures are a bit rubbery, but they're still better than anything you've got

No, they are not. As you said yourself: "Church membership requires not just baptism - an event - but also communion - an ongoing relationship.". This can be very easily measured by the churches reported attendance, which is at best, somewhere around the 30% mark for Irish Roman Catholics.

Peregrinus

Mark Hamill wrote: »

No, they are not. As you said yourself: "Church membership requires not just baptism - an event - but also communion - an ongoing relationship.". This can be very easily measured by the churches reported attendance, which is at best, somewhere around the 30% mark for Irish Roman Catholics.

You're assuming that, in the Catholic understanding of commuion, "being in communion" requires - not favours, or calls for, but positively requires - regular chuich attendance such that, if you're not attending regularly, you're not in communion.

This is not the case.