You can offically deromanise yourself in other contexts, though. Here in Germany, denominational affiliation is recognised and recorded by the state. (Baptism is sufficient to get you pegged as RC.) If you wish to leave the church officially, you must go down to the town hall and deregister yourself. Now, the large majority of German RCs are purely nominal catholics. At most, they have a sentimental desire to use church facilities for baptisms, marriages and funerals. So they stay in, as the church will (understandably, I must say) generally refuse these services to non-members. The downside is that every registered member of the RC church (as well as of the mainstream Lutheran church and the Jewish community) is assessed a church tax, collected by the state and handed over to the relevant religious body. Only by deregistering can one escape this tax.

So in Germany at least, as well as in other countries that collect and transfer a tax to the RC church, that church has a strong financial incentive to take a soft line on dissenters and the lukewarm. It will be interesting to see (i) whether Ratzinger will take a harder line and seek to purge his church of its Laodiceans, leaving a much smaller but much purer ‘remnant’, and, if so (ii), how his brother bishops in Germany will react.

Deregistrations from both main denominations have been increasing apace, BTW, but the large majority of Germans remain notional but registered members. Personally, I wish more Germans would have the courage of their lack of convictions and deregister, thereby reducing the RC church’s tax revenue. (That’s not a bit of pope-bashing either; though I’m a prod, I wish more people on my side of the line would do the same. A bright line between God and Caesar is a good thing for both, in my book.)

An aside to Ophelia Benson: though I imagine a pigskin football would indeed be not quite the thing, halakhically speaking, I don’t think we’ll see ha-Poel Tel Aviv hanging up their boots any time soon. (Well, admittedly ha-Poel might not be the most observant of Israeli footballers. Who would the frum support – Betar?) Footballs these days are usually synthetic. Indeed, most are made in Pakistan, where one imagines many workers would be reluctant to make pigskin balls.

Please stop it or you’ll just have to leave the Church.

This is the way most Protestants in the US have always operated—switching seamlessly between churches of different “mainline Protestant” denominations depending on location, parking, kids’ programs, etc. Sounds good to me.

This is the Catholic Church we’re taking about here., with a history as long and as varied as any human institution. If Ratzinger is as bad as some people fear, then he’ll only be maybe the one hundredth worse pope ever. Given the Church’s history, the only way a person of conscience can ever be a Catholic is if they distinguish the Church from its current hierarchy.

I don’t know if Maria or any other Catholics on whether they should quit the church because of Ratzinger or for any other reason. Any human institution is perforce imperfect, even human institutions claiming to speak for God. When its imperfections overwhelm its contributions is a matter for the individual conscience.

But the stance that the Catholic Church is its hierarchy or is its doctrine is absurd. It may dovetail exactly with the agenda of people in power, which may be why people in power are so assiduous in spreading it, but a church that has been headed by both John XII and John XXIII can contain multitudes.

“…in 1935 Pius XI issued a statement entitled “On Better Care for Catechetical Teaching” that says… that “Pastors shall not admit to reception of the sacraments of Penance and Confirmation, as prescribed in Canon 1330, children who have not acquired sufficient knowledge of the catechism according to directives of the Decree of the Sacred Congregation of the Sacraments on August 8, 1910”.”

Ummmmm…..why didn’t he mention subparagraph 254© of Section 119, I wonder?

In short: unbaptized as I am, I find that kind of language quite absurd when applied to the problems of transcendence, evil, human goodness and charity, and love.

I went to catechism (later called CCD), but the only two things I remember is 1. I built a kick-ass Temple out of Legos for a project one year, and 2. my confirmation teacher said that all pre-marital sexual activity, aside from being a sin in its own right, was simply a boy using a girl’s body to masturbate into.

(Apparently, something magical happens when you take the vows of marriage, and suddenly you are fully endowed with the ability to enjoy sexual activity not as a sin, but as a wonderful procreational activity).

I lost my faith early in my teens, and I haven’t found it again. I go to church every Sunday (Congregational) because I’m paid to sing, and I do find spiritual value in the music, and sometimes in the words we sing. But I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell, and I no longer worry that I’m headed to the latter. (I spent many hours of my childhood tormented by the thought of Hell, because I was sure that I was headed there). And if there is a God, He sure has been an absentee father in my life.

A very perceptive comment, Adam. I’ve had to struggle for years with the fact that my family members—who most emphatically do not agree with the Vatican that their gay son/brother is afflicted with an “intrinsic moral evil”—have remained in the Church that I quite happily left some 20 years ago. And I think you’re hitting on something very important—the regular practice of these highly aestheticized rituals really does “get under your skin.” My 70-year-old parents are basically completely fed up with the Church; my mother was crushed by the sex abuse scandals and is probably appalled by the selection of Ratzinger. But she ain’t goin’ nowhere. “It’s not their Church,” she’s taken to saying, “it’s mine.”

And even as I ponder the discussion upthread about really “leaving” the Church—i.e., I’m considering contacting the church in which I was baptized to be removed from the rolls—I’m fully aware that on some ineffable, almost cellular level, some part of me will always remain “Catholic.”

They’re not looking very closely then…

Great question, but I don’t think the answer rests entirely with the Church itself. JP II gave due prominence to social and economic questions and had all sorts of interesting, not at all stereotypically conservative things to say about them, but that fact was basically suppressed in North America—George Bush certainly wouldn’t have been all over him if he actually knew or cared what the man had said. I’m an atheist and no doubt could be better informed here, but my impression is that it’s the American (perhaps more generally Western) media (and public, I suppose) who are obsessed with issues of sex and gender, rather than the RCC itself. It’s as if the line is: Dear Pope, we will continue to pretend to treat you respectfully, but we are not in fact going to listen to anything you have to say about anything until you fall into line on abortion, homosexuality and the other sex-and-gender stuff we personally care most about. As someone who tends to see stubbornness as a virtue, I kind of admire the Church’s refusal to fall into line, but then since I’m a non-Catholic the fact that they’re substantively wrong is no skin off my nose. My sympathies go out to those in Maria’s position—I don’t really see any good options there.

Um. No. I don;t think this is my style.

Anyway, they wouldn’t actually stop counting me.

Well, they actually do BOTH.

The only thing I can conceive of having an effect from within is to be quite polite and open with your priest about what church teachings you’re violating that you can’t repent of violating because you believe the church teachings are immoral. And say that you don’t believe you’re in a state of mortal sin, so you will go forward for communion, but it’s his choice whether to give it to you.

If they deny communion to all the people they say are unfit to receive communion, instead of just easy targets like gay people or remarried people or certain politicians—90% of American & European Catholics will not be eligible for communion. They are going to have an open revolt on their hands.

The Catholic Church is one of the powers of the earth. So even though I am in no way a Catholic, not even an ex-Catholic, I still care what happens. The way I cared who was in power in the old Soviet Union, even though I was neither a Soviet nor a Communist.

This basically looks bad to me. And I don’t feel at all good, as I have said, about being forced to care about the pronouncements of the leaders of such an extraordinarily peccable and maculate institution.

I’m still officially on the roles in my adopted home parish, and I’ll tell you why the church is so hard to leave—because it’s not just a matter of assent to a list of doctrines. It’s about your actual body—the process of participating actively in the liturgy, the “smells and bells,” the music that can still send a chill down your spine when the Gloria comes back on Holy Thursday after having been gone all through Lent, the rosary beads, etc., etc. It’s about being part of an actual, physical process of worship with people all around the world—knowing that you could walk into a church in Germany or Vietnam and still participate in all the most important ways.

More than being a set of doctrines, tradition in the real, lived sense is the set of practices—physical practices—in which Catholics participate, and the reason it hurts dissenting Catholics to think of leaving is because they really do share a lot with all these terribly bigotted people who believe themselves to be running the show. The liturgical life of the church has a rhythm and meaning of its own, though, that does not finally rely on the varied formal pronouncements of popes.

People who don’t understand how one can be Catholic without “believing” some set of doctrines don’t seem to me to know what it means to be Catholic in the most important sense of the word—not thinking you’re Catholic, but actually being Catholic in a way that you can no longer really help.

And I say that as an obnoxious convert who was eager to promote orthodoxy and who tore myself to shreds emotionally because (surprise!) I was unable to break the habit of masturbating when I converted at the age of 18. But I ended up going to a lot of masses, for some stretches every day of the week, and I ended up saying a lot of rosaries, so I feel like I’ve almost made up for the lost time that cradle Catholics have on me. “Just become Episcopalian” isn’t as easy of an answer as it sounds.

Well, that’s very good of you to do all the research, although I do wonder whether Vatican II may have superseded such things. But take it up with my old parish priest, mate: I was only seven at the time.

functional: In my experience, only cradle Catholics would be proud of being ignoramuses about the faith that they supposedly believe in.

Well, since your experience is probably that of sitting in the front row among the other late arrivals, at a safe distance from the rest of us, that’s not surprising.

functional again: They think that even while remaining Catholic, they have a right to protest against Catholic teachings, and that when they do so, it is they who are infallible rather than the Pope.

Oh, that’s utter bollocks. As Cardinal Ratzinger, he wasn’t speaking from an ex cathedra position of infallibility—a word so overused it’s silly—and as Pope, he hasn’t done so yet. The world is fallible; people are fallible.

I think there’s certainly a degree of commonality between cradle Catholics and secular Jews that’s not shared either by converts or those looking in from the outside, waving their copies of canon law. As others have said, doctrine comes and goes, and so do Popes. And personally, I’d say that you don’t ever get away from the Church in your own lifetime, but you can make sure that it doesn’t get your kids. After all, in a curious combination of Humanae Vitae and The Selfish Gene, from the Church’s perspective, an adult Catholic is primarily a means of generating more Catholics.

francis: Perhaps the tradition provides comfort, but it must come at a terrible cost of burying the cognitive inconsistencies.

Cognitive inconsistency? That’s what Catholicism is all about.

I reckon most lapsed Catholics, rather than being ex-Catholics, are simply just sinners. You know, like all the Catholics who haven’t lapsed. Different sins, maybe, but basically the same.

As for those who’ve deliberately turned their backs on the Faith, then, yeah, there’s a good chance they shouldn’t be counted. Catholics are considered excommunicated Latæ Sententiæ if they deliberately choose the reject the doctrines of the Church – and there are mitigating factors, notably ignorance or lack of liberty.

I hope exit isn’t the only option. Loyal opposition from within, maybe.