Thousands of Argentinians Are Officially Leaving the Catholic Church in Protest

[phands]

About time....let's hope this happens worldwide....

Leaving the Catholic Church — officially — isn’t something you can just do with your mind. While anyone can mentally check out of a faith, the Church considers you one of their own unless you file the proper paperwork. Thankfully, there are people who will gladly guide you through the process.
In Argentina, where two-thirds of the population is Catholic, there are a lot of reasons to be frustrated with the Church. It’s not just the sexual abuse scandals. Because of pressure from the Church, the legislature recently voted to block a bill that would’ve allowed abortions through 14 weeks of pregnancy. On top of that, you have the Church’s stance against marriage equality, LGBTQ rights, comprehensive sex education, etc.
That’s why a group called Collective Apostasy has been helping people officially walk away from the Church. When I first wrote about them a couple of weeks ago, they were just trying to grab people’s attention, as were other organizations that were part of the Coalition for a Lay State.
Their work is paying off.

In the month since the country’s senate voted to maintain a ban on almost all abortions, more than 3,700 people have submitted apostasy applications to the Argentinian synod, according to César Rosenstein, a lawyer and founding member of the Argentinian Coalition for a Lay State.
…“Apostasy is an important symbolic and political act,” said Rosenstein, who said that visits to the group’s website had shot up since the vote from 100 daily unique users to around 40,000 a day.
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It’s a small percentage, but that’s 3,700 people who have taken the first step to divorce themselves from the Catholic Church. It’s bound to go up.
One of the sticking points for the self-described apostates is what their paperwork will get them. Will the Church delete all records of their existence as members? Not exactly…

Although the Catholic church usually responds to apostasy requests by annotating “Apostate” on the baptismal records of applicants, campaigners are demanding instead that their names be erased altogether from church registers — and that their baptismal certificates be physically destroyed.
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“Although Argentina’s data protection law allows the church to keep personal data of its members, we are arguing that the personal data of people who no longer consider themselves members must be deleted from the church’s files altogether,” says Rosenstein.

I love the idea of even the record being deleted.....just like a "right-to-forgotten" on Google.

http://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/...ially-leaving-the-catholic-church-in-protest/

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I guess I've been an official apostate for about 25 years and didn't even know it.

Kept receiving mail and sets of church donation envelopes for a couple years, a real pain in the ass. So I visited the rectory, informed them of my wish to be removed from any church roles as I no longer attended services or thought that gods were real. Worked like a charm.

I doubt most folks take this route. They just stop with the sunday mass thing and attend the obligatory funerals, weddings, etc.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

On the one hand, I'm against giving the Church this level of legitimacy by accepting that they're the ones who get to decide whether or not someone is a member, as opposed to those people not being members anymore simply by not having anything to do with them.

On the other hand, it is a way to give a direct and affirmative "fuck you" to the Church to inform them of how much you are against them and their actions as opposed to simply not having anything to do with them.