Re joining the RCChurch

In My Humble Opinion
41

Even if you get yourself excommunicated. From the perspective of the Catholic Church, membership cannot be undone. Excommunication means you’re ineligible to receive sacraments, but you’re still a member of the Church. At least from their perspective; you are, of course, free not to give a shit about what they think.

I’m German, and I was baptised Catholic. In Germany, church membership is a matter of governmental bureaucracy, because it determines your liability to pay church tax (which is collected by the government as part of income tax and then passed on to the church you’re a member of). I quit the church a little while ago, which involved going to a local government office, signing a piece of paper, and paying a fee. My church tax liability ended. Theologically, that makes me an apostate, because I wilfully denounced the church, but under canon law (the internal law of the Catholic Church), that gets me excommunicated but did not sever my membership. If I wanted to re-join, I’d have to talk to a local parish priest and re-register at the local government office.

42

Church tax? Wholly Moses, that would make me slip my last cog. Do you still have to “tithe” in addition? No separation of church and state in Germany?

Cecil had a column years ago about excommunication wherein he said being excommunicated meant you were damned to Hell, although I think you could still be “saved” somehow. I take it the Catholic church is a little more lenient nowadays?

43

It’s a complicated story that only exists for historical reasons, and many Germans find it as outrageous as you do. But yes, some religious organisations (including the two dominant Christian denominations, Catholics and Lutherans, but also some non-Christian ones such as local Jewish congregations) are corporations under public law with tax-levying powers. If you’re registered as a member in the government’s registers, there’ll be a surcharge in your income tax that goes to the church.

In terms of quantity, it’s a 9% surcharge on your income tax. That’s 9%, not percentage points, so if your effective average (not marginal) tax rate is, say, 30% without church tax it’ll be 32.7% including church tax (30% plus 9% of 30%).

44

I mean, wow. Does any politician campaign or advocate for getting rid of it?

45

Not really. Many people are dissatisfied with the situation, but I’m not aware of politicians (with any degree of significant public profile - there are, of course, minor candidates talking about it) campaigning about it. Every now and then someone comes up with the opposite idea - introducing a new tax equal to church tax that would go to the government but payable only by those who don’t yet pay church tax. But that never gains any traction. The main option this leaves people with is to quit; in fact, the two major churches are bleeding members - it’s currently several hundred thousand people a year leaving the church, and the tax is one of the major reasons cited by people who’ve done it. It’s actually turning into a major crisis for the two big churches in Germany, whose entire funding model is built on the tax.

46

Paging fellow Germans @Pardel-Lux and @EinsteinsHund in case they wish to contribute to this conversation.

47

Hispano-German, to be precise, so I allow myself to quote Don Quijote: “¡Con la Iglesia hemos topado!” (translation: “Across the Holy F*king Church we have come!”
The situation has been correctly presented by Schnitte, only he is a very correct and polite person and has painted the whole mess in a very rosy way. It is much worse that that. Here is a bit by Wikipedia on the fortune held by the Roman Catholic Church:

Der Sozialwissenschaftler Carsten Frerk untersuchte 2001 das Vermögen der römisch-katholischen Kirche in Deutschland. Nach seinen Berechnungen summierten sich Ende 2002 die Werte von Grundbesitz, Immobilien, Geldanlagen und Beteiligungen der katholischen Kirche und der zu ihr gehörenden Institutionen auf ein Vermögen von 270 Milliarden Euro. Die römisch-katholische Kirche sei mit 8250 km² Grundeigentum größter privater Grundbesitzer in Deutschland. Frerk führte im Jahr 2013 neue Berechnungen durch, nach denen sich das Vermögen der katholischen Kirche 2013 auf bis zu 200 Milliarden Euro belief. Haupteinnahmequellen der Kirche seien die Kirchensteuer, Vermögenserträge und Staatsleistungen.

Translated with DeepL, slightly corrected:

In 2001, the social scientist Carsten Frerk examined the assets of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany. According to his calculations, at the end of 2002, the value of land, real estate, investments and holdings of the Catholic Church and its affiliated institutions totaled 270 billion euros. The Roman Catholic Church is the largest private landowner in Germany with 8250 km² of real estate. Frerk carried out new calculations in 2013, according to which the assets of the Catholic Church amounted to up to 200 billion euros in 2013. The church’s main sources of income are church tax, property income and state payments.

The State payments to the Church include payments for providing education and child care (this is not The Pit, so I will refrain from making easy tasteless jokes). Despite the fact that the German State has no official religion it treates the two “main Churches” (catholics and protestants) in a privileged way: the churches may impose a code of conduct on people they hire, for instance, if you were to be employed by the Catholic Church as a secretary, working for instance in one of their libraries, they would be able to fire you if you behaved immorally (i.e.: having an abortion, being divorced, being a single mother or simply not being catholic anymore → apostasy). Here is another wikipedia article on the special status of the churches as employers. From that article (interestingly not translated into any other language, like the one I quoted first, which is not often the case in wikipedia):

In mid-2022, around 1.3 million people in Germany are employed by churches and their charitable organizations, including 790,000 by the Catholic Church (700,000 by Caritas) […] In April 2013, the Federal Labor Court ruled that the dismissal of a social education worker by Caritas was permissible under labor law because he had left the church. […] According to the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on the sacramentality of marriage, remarriage is a violation of the church’s moral teachings. However, with the reform of church employment law on November 22, 2022, which was passed by over two-thirds of the Roman Catholic German bishops with the necessary majority, remarriage no longer leads to a consequence under employment law. (bolding mine)

Oh, I could go on for quite a while, being as I am staunchly anti-clerically minded. This probably is rooted in my upbringing in Spain under Franco’s school system / doctrine and the Augustinian School I attended. That is my spirit of contradiction. Suffice it to say that the situation has been getting slowly better, in the '50s the churches were proud of their bigotry and openly displayed it. Today they try to hide it, they know it is no longer popular. But it is still a scandal, and it is more or less the same in Spain, Swizzerland and Austria: taxes collected by the State for the Church, fiscal and labour law privileges for the church(es) (only the Catholic Church in Spain, of course), and many more things I don’t want to think about. Except if you ask, so go ahead. I can’t guarantee being even minded, fair, composed or equanimous. But I do have an opinion.

48

I’m only chiming in to support both @Schnitte’s factual as well as @Pardel-Lux’s ranty submissions. I can’t quite add to it, but I’m a lapsed Catholic too (did all the motions in my childhood, was an altar boy till the age of 17). I lost my faith and respect for the Catholic church around age 12, but only officially quit in 1993 when I was 25 (yeah, 30th anniversary as a heathen this year!), by the process @Schnitte described. I also think that the connections of both main Christian denominations with the state and their privileges, especially being able to discriminate against their employees with ease, are a terrible thing. One more example, the Churches as employers are exempt from the right of their employees to strike.

49

This thread makes me wonder if I’m Catholic, per the Roman Catholic Church. I was, according to family lore, baptized by my grandmother in the kitchen sink with bottled holy water (it’s pretty common for Catholic grandmothers with agnostic children to rescue their unbaptized grandchildren in this way). However, there were no priests involved, it wasn’t an emergency, and no further Catholicism happened. Would that count, per the Church? I imagine if I want to join, they’d encourage another baptism, but I wonder what my current status is by their rules.

50

They would never encourage another baptism if the first one was valid; under Catholic doctrine, baptism, once conferred, can neither be repeated nor undone.

As for whether yours was valid: Under canon law (link), baptism must, under ordinary circumstances, be conferred by a bishop, presbyter or deacon. In their absence, it can be done by laypeople designated by the local bishop. Assuming that your grandmother hasn’t been designated for this purpose, the only limb under which this baptism could be valid would be under the “necessity” rule, whereby anyone with the intention to perform a baptism can do so (even non-Catholics). However, the concept of “necessity” is interpreted narrowly, mostly confined to emergencies where there is a risk that the candidate would die before a proper minister could be obtained. So I’d guess the baptism in your case was not valid.

51

That was my thought, too. Oh, well: it probably made her feel better.

52

There is an Irish Catholic belief (more of a superstition, really) that each person who receives communion at your funeral takes a year off your time in limbo. This is of course intended to push everybody to get to confession for the sake of the dear departed and get to a state of grace before the funeral. Nonetheless, you wouldn’t dare be seen just sitting at the bench and not taking communion at a Funeral Mass. That would be the stuff of long family feuds beginning.

When my Great Grandmother passed, I was in my 20’s, and hadn’t been to a Catholic Church in a decade at least. About a third of the way into the service I remembered the trouble I was in. When the communion lines formed, I lined up in front of Father Jim, who married my parents, and baptized me, and taught me how to bet at poker.

When I got to the front, I gave him a look of desperation, and he gave me one of mischievous understanding. He passed his hand over me, gave me absolution, and then gave me communion.

The whole room saw him do it, so it’s not like I got off scot free, but at least no serious rules had been broken by anybody.

53

This surprises me, due to how the Catholic Church treats Protestant baptisms. If I understand correctly, they are considered valid as long as they were done “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit [or Ghost].” Hence someone converting from (trinitarian) Protestantism to Catholicism doesn’t get rebaptized.

So I thought it was one of those situations where, even if it wasn’t done “correctly,” it still counted.

54

You mean Purgatory.

Those in limbo (like the unfortunate unbaptized babies) never get out. :roll_eyes: They’re stuck in No Man’s Person’s land for all eternity. Tough toenails, eh?

55

As long as you are baptized under the trinitarian formula, I believe it is a valid baptism. The Catholics are pretty adamant about that. That’s why any other trinitarian Christian denomination’s baptism is accepted by them. They exclude Unitarian and Mormon baptisms exactly because they deny the trinity.

However, if it was irregular – such as the example of a grandmother baptizing at home – I am guessing that more would be required, such as some kind of documentation, attestation by (Catholic) witnesses, etc. Maybe video.

But it’s a real baptism, as far as I have ever heard. One would need to be confirmed (by a priest or bishop), and registered in a parish to be a full Catholic. But you wouldn’t not go to heaven because you hadn’t been baptized. Which is the grandmother’s worry.

56

Limbo has been denigrated and is no longer Catholic doctrine.

57

Glad to hear that. Where did the unbaptized babies get transferred to?

And what about all those people who went to Hell for eating meat on Friday back when it was a sin?

58

It’s not a mortal sin to eat meat on Friday. Only mortal sins will separate you from God so far that you will never see paradise.

For a sin to be mortal, there are criteria. It has to be a grave matter, entered into with the full knowledge and consent of the sinner. That is, you have to know it’s a sin, and you have to freely do it anyway. You can’t be forced into it, or accidentally sin out of ignorance or otherwise.

There’s lists. Catholics are big on lists. The so called Seven Deadly Sins: pride, greed, gluttony, sloth, um lessee … wrath, envy and lust. There’s also the 10 Commandments. Those are also ‘grave’.

59

Catholics are professionals at rules lawyering, so if you can think of a situation it’s probably been thought of by a canon lawyer. There are multiple versions of a conditional baptismal formula, such as “If you are not baptized, then I baptise you in the name of…”

See the Wiki entry at Conditional Baptism for more.

60

yeah, they’ve been working at it for 2000 years so, you know, it’s probably come up before.