RC church changes cannon law to prevent defection.

Nevyn

The topic of getting children baptised comes up very frequently on this forum and it's been expressed by parents that even as they consider themselves not to be catholic any more they are going to let the children be baptised and when the children are adult they can opt out or defect.

Well give the rise in the numbers of people world wide opting out/defecting,
the Roman Catholic Church has amended the section of cannon law (their rules)
so that it is not longer possible to opt out/defect.

http://www.countmeout.ie/suspension/

Suspension of the Defection Process

In April of this year, the Catholic Church modified the Code of Canon Law to remove all references to the act of formal defection, the process used by those who wish to formally renounce their membership of the Church.

Since then, the Catholic Church in Ireland has been reflecting on the implications of this change for those who wish to leave the Catholic Church. Despite our requests for clarification, the Church have yet to reach a firm position on how or whether they will continue to accept requests for the annotation of the baptismal register.

In recent weeks we have been contacted by an increasing number of people whose defections have not been processed, due to the limbo created by this canon law amendment.

Because of this uncertainty, we have taken the decision to suspend the creation of declarations of defection via CountMeOut.ie.


Why has the Church made this change?

The first reference to the act of formal defection was introduced in the 1983 revision of the Code of Canon Law and was intended to create a special dispensation that absolved those who had defected from canon law pertaining to marriage. The Church considers canon law to hold for everyone who has been baptised; this change introduced a special case such that the marriages of estranged former-Catholics were now considered to be valid.

In practice, the Church found this difficult to interpret, as it was unclear what the process of formal defection actually entailed. So in 1997, a process of consultation began with the intention of removing these dispensations.

In parallel to this discussion, an issue arose in countries such as Germany, where citizens are required to pay a Church Tax unless they make a statement to the tax authorities. An annotated baptismal cert was sometimes requested for this purpose, resulting in a 2006 papal note that finally explained the process of defection in more detail. These are the steps we describe on CountMeOut.ie.

This position remained unchanged until November 2009, when the Vatican approved the document "Omnium in Mentem", removing the dispensations introduced in 1983 and with them all references to formal defection. This came into effect on April 9th 2010.

Overheal

Thats fine, they'll just have a lot more Atheists/Zionists/Muslims/Hindu/Bhuddist/Protestant followers in the Catholic Church now.

Sefirah

Overheal wrote: »

Thats fine, they'll just have a lot more Atheists/Zionists/Muslims/Hindu/Bhuddist/Protestant followers in the Catholic Church now.

Zionism isn't a religion, it's a political belief. Perhaps you meant 'Judaism'.

Das Kitty

I wonder what will happen when a census disagrees with the church's own figures?

byhookorbycrook

If you longer live by a religion or practice, is that not the same?The anti-defection thing smacks of closing your eyes and saying, because you can't see it ,it's not happening

lynski

byhookorbycrook wrote: »

If you longer live by a religion or practice, is that not the same?The anti-defection thing smacks of closing your eyes and saying, because you can't see it ,it's not happening

Because you cant see it in numbers it is not happening so far as the church and the state are concerned. The artificially high numbers of registered catholics are used to justify all sorts of things all over the world, but here they are used to justify catholic church involvement in schools particularly, social work/programmes, hospitals, community groups, etc. They are used to justify the involvement of catholic hierarchy in government policy and social policy as well as buttressing the justification for their opinion being sought on just about anything in the media.
Numbers matter, if they didn't why would they bother to remove defections in the first place?
Think before you baptise, you can 'check out, but you can never leave'

Grawns

I wonder what happens if you convert to another religion and are formally baptized into it

Now what do I have to do to get myself excommunicated again?

Hobbitfeet

Surely there is something we can do to change this so we can have our records deleted from the church?
If we have a Human Right to be part of any Religion then should we not have the right to leave any Religion?

I suggest that the Irish people who want to formally defect "unregister" from the Catholic Church should bring this matter to the European Court for Human Rights

Orion

I'm sure the guys in Humanities or Atheism & Agnosticism would love to continue this conversation. However this forum is not a soapbox.