How to "un-baptize"/ Withdraw affiliation with RCC?

gizmo555 wrote: »

A better tack to take might be to make a subject access request to the church for the data it holds about you. . . .

Well, if all you want is to know what data they are holding about you, you can just ask for a copy of your baptismal certificate, for which there is usually no fee. But, as you point out . . .

gizmo555 wrote: »

Along with a copy of the data, you are entitled to an explanation of the specific purposes for which the data is being held - you might want to make it clear in your request that you want this explanation.

Personal data may not be retained for longer than is necessary to fulfill the specific purposes for which it was originally collected. These purposes cannot be amended after the data is collected without your consent.

If, for example, the church answers that it processes baptismal records to keep track of its members, you might be justified in asking for your record to be deleted on the grounds that you've left the church.

First point to note is that the person to whom your data access request has to be directed is the “data controller” – the person who controls the contents and use of your personal data. In the context of a Catholic church baptismal record, that’s the parish priest of the church in which you were baptized. Catholic church sacramental records are highly decentralized. There is no point in writing to the bishop asking what data the diocese holds about you; they probably don’t hold any, and they almost certainly hold none about your baptism. (The only circumstance in which your baptismal records are likely to be held by the diocese is if the parish of your baptism has been closed. The records of closed parishes are transferred to the diocesan archives.)

Second point to note is that, as well as knowing what church you were baptized in, you’ll need to have a good idea of the likely date or range of dates for your baptism. Baptismal registers are chronological; baptisms are entered in the order they are performed and, though the names of the various parties are recorded, they’re usually not indexed, so without knowing roughly when a putative baptism might have been, it’s pretty well impossible to find out whether there’s an entry relating to you.

As regards the purpose for keeping a record, the answer is likely to be something along these lines:
1 We keep baptismal registers because canon law requires it.
2 We keep baptismal registers so that if people look for baptismal certificates we can issue them.
3 We keep baptismal registers so that if it is claimed that someone has been baptized we can try and verify that.
4 We keep baptismal records because they are of significant value for historical and genealogical research.

Even if you could get them to delete the register entry relating to your baptism, it would likely have no effect on the estimate of church membership. Every parish, every year, sends a return to the diocese of numbers of baptisms, numbers of communions, numbers of confirmations, marriages, funerals, etc. So the diocese may have no record of the fact that you were baptized in Ballymagash parish in (say) 1980, but it does hold a record showing that in that year (say) 85 people were baptized in Ballymagash. Even though you are one of the 85 people, that’s not personal data relating to you; there’s nothing in the raw number that tells us that gizmo is one of the 85. And even if your baptismal record is later deleted, the raw number for 1980 will not be changed, because it remains true that there were 85 baptisms in the parish in that year and there is no reason to falsify that record and pretend there were only 84. And, of course, to the extent that the diocese relies on baptismal records at all in its estimate of current Catholics, it’s simply the raw number they’d be looking at. In order to estimate the number of Catholics today, at no stage do they need to form an opinion on whether gizmo is or is not a Catholic today. It’s an estimated number, not a list of names.

SW wrote: »

It does seem that the RCC have their own counting system (24 Feb 2013). Using guesstimates they managed to have 100 million of a surplus compared to a Pew Research Center which used self-identification as a baseline.

Yes. But it has to be pointed out that the Catholic church's estimate for Ireland has generally tallied closely with the self-identification figures from the RoI and NI censuses.

More to the point, nothing in the linked article suggests that the Catholic church's estimating methodology consists simply of counting all baptised people. In fact the article suggests several data points are employed - mass attendance estimates, numbers celebrating lifetime events like marriage or first communion, etc. And there is nothing to support the view that everyone ever baptised is counted as a current Catholic, or that if people could "de-baptise" this would reduce the estimate of current Catholics.

ninja900 wrote: »

. . . And you have to admit it would be pretty cool to get a letter saying that my future corpse is barred from all catholic churches :cool:

OK, I have to give you that!

ninja900 wrote: »

That's the whole point, I haven't left as far as they are concerned, because there is no process which recognises that one has left.

From their point of view, there's no need for a process. Being Catholic is not a matter of being registered somewhere or having your name on a list; it;s a matter of being in communion with the Catholic church, "communion" being a particular spiritual relationship. If you're not in communion, you're not a Catholic, end of. You don't need anyone's agreement, anyone's assent, anyone's acknowledgement; you don't even need anyone else to be aware. (Though, of course, if you want them to be aware, there's nothing to stop you telling them.) Given their understanding, establishing a procedure that you need to go through in order to not be Catholic is not liberating you; it's restricting you. It's setting up hoops that you have to jump through, and treating you as a Catholic if you won't jump through the hoops in defiance of the actual fact, which is that you are not a Catholic.

ninja900 wrote: »

The bolded bit contradicts the argument you were making earlier, that one's presence on a baptismal register doesn't mean one is counted as a member. So does it or doesn't it?

I'm not seeing the contradiction; at no point does the bolded bit imply that people were regarded as Catholic because, and only because, they were baptised.

To be a Catholic, in the Catholic perspective, you have to be:

(a) baptised (in any church, not necessarily the Catholic church) and

(b) in a relationship of communion with other Catholics (which is why Ian Paisley, although baptised, is not regarded as a Catholic).

If you're baptised in the Catholic church, and they need to make a decision for some reason or other that you are or not a Catholic, there's a presumption that you were raised in communion and remain in communion unless and until there is something to show that this is not the case.

For a brief period, for certain purposes, the only thing that they would accept as showing that you were no longer in communion was the formal notification procedure that countmeout.ie would take you through. The result, of course, was that large numbers of people who were not in communion were treated as being in communion because they couldn't be arsed to go through the one procedure that was acceptable. This was wholly unrealistic; hence they dropped the rule that this procedure was required to evidence the termination of communion.

ninja900 wrote: »

The rest of the quote above is just nonsense. There was a process by which the RCC would officially recognise that one had left, they removed that process. That isn't making it easier to leave, it's making it impossible.
Just walking away from the church is not recognised by them. You yourself said that a baptised person can still be counted as a member. A baptised person is also entitled to an RC funeral.

What I want is for the RC to refuse me a funeral, if asked

Sadly for you, not being a Catholic is generally not a bar to having a Catholic funeral. The Catholic church is usually happy to celebrate a funeral for a non-Catholic, if asked. The point about not being a Catholic in this context is that you don't have a right to a Catholic funeral, but that's no guarantee that you won't be given one if your grieving relatives ask for one.

Best way to rule yourself out is to be a notorious and unrepentant public sinner on a grand scale - jailed mafia boss, Nazi war criminal, that kind of thing. If that seems like too much trouble, the next best step is to make a will leaving generous bequests to your relatives conditional upon their not having given you a Catholic funeral, and make sure that they know of this.

Generous bequests to get one's way?? Unlikely to be an option. Even in death the rich go by different rules...

As for the defection system placing impositions on ex-catholics, I disagree totally.
One always had, and still does have, the option of just walking away and getting on with one's life.
The whole point of the defection process was not to get 'permission' to not be a practising catholic any more. One never needed permission for that. The whole point of it was getting recognition from the church that one no longer wishes to be considered a member. This is important to many people like me, who not only want nothing to do with that church in life or in death, but want that church to know this.

And pretty bad form if they are giving funerals to people they know have not considered themselves catholics for many years. I consider that deeply disrespectful to the deceased.

I was dismayed a while back when Maeve Binchy, a well-known atheist of many years, was given a catholic funeral. We can avoid them in life but they try to snatch us back in death.

ninja900 wrote: »

As for the defection system placing impositions on ex-catholics, I disagree totally.
One always had, and still does have, the option of just walking away and getting on with one's life.
The whole point of the defection process was not to get 'permission' to not be a practising catholic any more. One never needed permission for that. The whole point of it was getting recognition from the church that one no longer wishes to be considered a member. This is important to many people like me, who not only want nothing to do with that church in life or in death, but want that church to know this.

There's nothing to stop you telling them this, if you want to.

But if there's a rule saying that you must tell them this, that telling them this is the mechanism by which you leave, and that until you do tell them this you haven't left and are still "counted as a Catholic", it's obvious from both common sense and recent experience that most people who leave are not motivated to go through the process, and will still be counted as Catholics. In other words, having such a rule makes for the substantial overcounting of Catholics. The notion that they abandoned the formal process for leaving in order to inflate numbers of Catholics makes no sense at all; introducing the formal process for leaving would have inflated numbers; abandoning it enables more realistic estimates to be made.

ninja900 wrote: »

And pretty bad form if they are giving funerals to people they know have not considered themselves catholics for many years. I consider that deeply disrespectful to the deceased.

But the deceased's nearest and dearest, who might have a better sense than you of what the deceased wanted or what respect for the deceased demanded, clearly did not agree with you.

ninja900 wrote: »

I was dismayed a while back when Maeve Binchy, a well-known atheist of many years, was given a catholic funeral. We can avoid them in life but they try to snatch us back in death.

Do you know what her wishes in the matter were? And if you're taking a view on what her funeral should have been without knowing what her wishes were then who, exactly, is trying to "snatch her in death"?

Seamus Heaney was an unbeliever. He had a Catholic funeral. That was his choice. You can't assume that just because somebody identifies as an atheist that in all their views and wishes they slot into a neat and predictable stereotype.

Pope Francis should do the decent thing and annul all non-consensual baptisms, past and present.

If removing yourself from the baptismal register and/or renouncing your Catholic faith officially ISN'T A big deal, then why did the church specifically go out of their way to stop people doing it?

If I was a Catholic to begin with, I'd be making a big fuss about this and taking them to court over it.

You were made a Catholic before you could legally give consent for such a thing to be done and now the church is forbidding you from undoing it, I'd be livid and challenging it in court.