Leaving the Church (defection/debaptism/apostasy)

Formally leaving the Church may or may not be a matter of secularism, depending whether it reduces public funding for religion. In Germany if you've been baptised you must pay“church tax”, compulsory tithes collected by the state, unless you leave.
♦ Latest challenges to “church tax” in Germany and Spain
♦ Information on Church-leaving requirements in Austria, Belgium, Britain Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland

Although the Catholic Church is supposed to be “universal”, in practice there are widely differing requirements for officially leaving it. The road is smoother where the Church has had to face legal challenges (as in Italy) and also where the state controls the process because it must keep its own records of church membership in order to collect “church tax” (as in Germany). On the other hand where the Church controls the records and it is largely unchallenged, (as in Poland) the process of leaving it may turn out, in practice, to be very difficult.

“The Catholic Church considers everyone who is baptised its member. These people do not have to claim they belong to the Church in a census,” says Jiri Gracky, from the Czech Catholic Bishops' Conference [1]. In other words, the Church does not recognise the state's census figures which better reflect what people actually believe. It continues to inflate its own membership statistics by counting everyone who's been baptised. According to Catholic doctrine, undoing a baptism is simply not possible. However, the government census figures do represent political reality and in that sense Church leaving can ultimately lead to more secularism, as it makes it politically harder to justify religious privileges.

Both Islam and Catholicism consider leaving them to be the “sin” of apostasy, (but it's often easier to officially stop being a Catholic than it is to abandon Islam). A 13th-century picture shows St. Augustine driving the devil out of schismatics, those who held doctrines not approved by the Church and wished to leave it. An apostate, on the other hand, is someone who doesn't launch a rival religion, but simply wants to get out. So long as the Church controlled society, people could only leave it in the safety of a group through schism, but now this is being done increasingly on the individual level as apostasy.

To deal with this new situation, in 2006 Benedict XVI wrote a letter to bishops on “The formal act of defection from the Catholic Church”, (Actus formalis defectionis ab Ecclesia catholica). This appears to be the Vatican's attempt to keep the state from allowing someone to leave the Church at will. The Church insists that only it can decide if someone can get out, and in countries where Church membership has no tax implications the state has no civil rules for leaving the Church and this papal letter now determines the process. However, even in these countries, the requirements differ widely: in Ireland it is much easier to leave the Church, than it is in Poland, whose bishops have set up additional hurdles.

Any attempt to have the record of the baptism removed runs up against the brick wall of Canon 849, the Church law which asserts that baptism cannot be undone. As a Slovak discovered, it's no use invoking any secular laws about freedom of religion: the Church regulates this according to its own laws. [2] The best that can be achieved is a notation appended to the baptismal record. However, even this is being challenged in Spain. There the legal issue has become whether the European Union's data protection laws (1995, amended 2003) indeed apply to Church records.

Notes

	German church-tax threatened: Can you stop tithing and still remain Catholic?
	According to Church doctrine the Catholic Church is the “Mystical Body of Christ”. Yet it's worth €5 billion annually for the German bishops to maintain that this is indissolubly linked to the Church as a “public corporation under German law”. This lets them excommunicate anyone who doesn't pay church tax. However, a devout retired professor of Church law took them to court. He won the first round, lost the appeal and is now bringing it to the Vatican.
	Germany, Austria and Switzerland
	You can leave the church by appearing at a government office with the required documents in both Germany and Austria, but in Switzerland you are forced to go to the parish office. Germany collects “church tax” through your income tax and you should retain proof that you have left the German church, or you could still be forced to pay. Here's how to leave the Church in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
	France and Belgium
	France has separation of church and state, therefore leaving the church is a private matter, with no tax implications. EU directives on personal information make this unproblematic.
	Poland
	Although baptism is recognised everywhere, the Polish Church doesn't recognise “apostasy” committed abroad, (where it's much easier to officially leave the Church). It insists that you follow its own rules. These church-leaving regulations by the Polish bishops, issued in September 2008, seem designed to turn the applicant into a supplicant. They subject him to the greatest possible pressure from others and even risk tearing his family apart.
	Britain and Ireland
	In Britain and Ireland Church membership has no tax implications and so does not concern the state. The British Catholic Church has had unofficial and minority status ever since King Henry VIII appointed a more compliant state church. In Ireland, on the other hand, the political influence of the Catholic Church is massive, but it is now on the defensive due to recent scandals involving child abuse. In both countries defection is much easier than in countries like Poland.
	Nordic countries
	Denmark, Finland and Sweden all have church tax, and therefore in these countries church-leaving helps to prevent the state from collecting money for the religious organisations. Norway, on the other hand, finances its Lutheran state church (and others) through general tax revenues and intends to continue, even after renouncing the state's privilege of choosing bishops.
	Italy
	In 1999 Italians won the right to leave the Catholic Church, but that first step, and every subsequent one to ease the process, has had to be enforced by an independent official known as the “Guarantor of Privacy”. The website of the Italian Rationalists provides full details in Italian on how to do this, with the procedure summarised in English here.
	Spain
	Spain's Supreme Court ruled on 30 September 2008 that the fact of leaving the Church needn't be noted in baptism records. An appeal is now planned to the Constitutional Court. The Spanish Church based its case on the 1979 "Legal Affairs" concordat stipulating the "inviolability" of Church records.

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