Equality of marriage and love

No doubt the substantial cost of remaining nominally a member in countries like Germany helps concentrate minds.

Hmm yeah but the trend in non-RC-box-ticking here has a very considerable lag (20-30 years or more) compared to non-participation in mass, confession especially, and of course vocations which went into steep decline in the early 70s and never recovered.

Ticking a box is hardly a reliable indicator of 'membership' in any meaningful (non-wooey eternal change to the supposed soul) sense anyway, which is why I've always said the only thing we can be pretty sure of with someone ticking the RC box is that they were baptised, but anything in relation to their current beliefs or practices is an assumption.

If people are paying a substantial bit of money and are aware of that and that it's optional, then they are more inclined to question what their relationship with that body should be. My Irish brother-in-law was living in Switzerland for several years before he became aware that he was paying an optional tax... and he's a qualified accountant! Needless to say he opted out asap but was not best pleased about the amount he'd paid already.

Everyone who takes up permanent residency in Germany has to register their religious identification. This isn't a rule for Irish people only, or for (former) Catholics only.

As for having to be registered as a Catholic in order to be married in a Catholic church, this ties into a subject that has been much discussed on boards in the past; can you ever really leave the Catholic church? It's an article of faith for some on this board that, in the Catholic church's view, you can't — once a Catholic, always a Catholic. Whereas the Catholic church's actual view is that you can indeed leave the church, but it requires a "formal act" which is in some way public. Simply not going to mass any more doesn't cut it, but being received into another church does, as does — in Germany — cancelling your registration as a Catholic with the state.

Does this mean you can't be married in a Catholic church? Not necessarily; in general, as long as one member of the couple is a Catholic, you can have a Catholic marriage ceremony. But if both have left the church, or if one has left the church and the other was never a member in the first place then no, you're not Catholics, you don't get a Catholic wedding. (But you'd hardly want one, so I don't see that the issue would arise very often in practice.)

And yet, you are surprised that text written by man is contradictory.

That's the most confusing aspect of all.

It's just some papal bull(sh1t).

The Bible. If we knew which man, he would have a lot to answer for.

Though I'd say he is long gone now.

I didn't say anything about the bible.

You appear to be talking in riddles.

This still isn't making a lot of sense, BSD. Can you write in complete sentences?

You've truncated the quote. It's ""We cannot be judges who only deny, reject and exclude".

So he's not saying "we can't make judgments"; he's saying "we can't only make judgments". We can judge homosexual relationships to be objectively sinful, but are other considerations that go into a decision about whether to bless people in such a relationship (as opposed to blessing the relationship, which I gather he rules out).