In Brussels, Belgium, de-baptisms are becoming more popular. And, when you think about it, why wouldn’t they be?
“When you don’t agree with an organisation that you never chose to join in the first place, the healthiest thing to do is to leave,” [de-baptized] Damien Spleeters told AFP.
It is, and it worries the Catholic Church.
That’s why they make it so hard to leave. If it was easy to leave, their “official” membership would drop precipitously.
In practise, de-baptism consists in writing to the church where the christening took place. The name is not actually struck off but noted on the baptismal registry, meaning that those who decide to leave cannot be married in the church or expect a Catholic funeral.
Not a big loss… there are better alternatives for reasonable people.
But it makes a nice statement to say that you “officially” have nothing to do with the Catholic Church. You don’t support the child raping (or their handling of it), you don’t support their misguided theology, you don’t support their methods of indoctrination, you don’t support their superstitious rituals, and you don’t support them financially. You want nothing to do with them altogether.
Of course, you could say all that without getting de-baptized. But going through the symbolic motion gets attention and lets people know that leaving the Church is not only an option, but an important one at that.