Provided I had the money and will to do so, what’s stopping me from buying or building a church, registering as a church with whatever goverment authorities are responsible for tax-exempt organizations, and performing all of the Catholic rituals with real or manufactured items, etc, with a knowing or unknowning congregation?
Can I be sued by a local Catholic church for copy right infringement? Will the US government accept two Catholic churches on the books?
If they won’t let me register as one, can I do everything else but call myself the California catholic church? How much legal control do the Catholics have over their identity as Catholics?
It’s perfectly legal. Theologically, you’re nothing but a schismatic branch of the Church, and that’s a perfectly fine position legally. It might get a little messy in the phone book, though.
You can call yourself what you want, and you won’t be sued. You just won’t be a genuine Catholic Church, and everyone will know that.
In the same way, I could put up a building, call it “Temple Beth-Astorian” and pretend my congregation and I are Jewish. The government won’t care. But we’ll be utterly bogus Jews, and real Jews certainly won’t take us seriously.
To look at a (sort of) concrete example of how this work, Fred Phelps calls his church “Westboro Baptist,” but he’s not affiliated with any actual Baptist group (the Southern Baptist Convention has denounced him many times). But “real” Baptists can’t force him to stop using that name.
The real Catholic church is a very top-down organization, so you won’t be able to just open your own franchise. The diocese owns the land, the church, provides ordained priests from their own seminaries, etc.
You can open any church you want, and call it whatever you want. However, if you pretend to be a part of the One True Church and solicit funds on that basis, it may constitute fraud. No doubt the local faithful will be rallied to ensure nobody goes to your church under a mispapprehension that they are going to a real Catholic church.
Other than tax exemption for property, I’m not sure what you are angling for. Yuo can collect donations from the “faithful”, but you can’t for example run a factory or store and claim it does not need to pay taxes. Your own salary may be tax exempt, but hat money has to come from somewhere.
The critical item is charitable tax-exempt status. Buying yourself a Maserati, gold bathroom fixtures or an airconditioned doghouse is probably not a charitable endeavor. I don’t know what the rules are for this staus and where the funds have to go, but I suspect the faithful will be a little less so when they realize they don’t get tax receipts for their donations. OTOH, if they start to grumble, move them all to Guyana and lay in a supply of koolaid.
Look at the Warren Jeffs-type Mormons - as much as they might like to I don’t think the mainstream Mormons can do anything about them (calling themselves Mormons), there’s that pesky freedom of religion thing.
Probably too late for this now, but couldn’t a church get a trademark on its name? This seems like exactly the sort of situation that government-recognized trademarks are supposed to protect against.
What about schisms and schismatic groups? If a schism divides a church, should the government decide which is the “real” church and which is not? For that matter, what’s to say Pope isn’t a corrupt impostor, and whatsthedealman doesn’t represent a better continuation of Catholic tradition?
It occurred to me that Scientology would be exactly the type of organization that would trademark its name. Sure enough, a search of the trademark database reveals several registered trademarks, with uses ranging from “Religious and Ministerial Services Including Pastoral Counseling” to “Jewelry-Namely, Pins, Badges, Necklaces and Bracelets”.
I can think of three such churches right off the bat: One started by Mel Gibson and his dad, which celebrates the Latin mass and likes to pretend Vatican II never happened; one that accepted Sinead O’Conner as a nun back in the 90s after her SNL diss of the Pope; Washington DC’s Imani Temple African-American Catholic Congregation, run by George Augustus Stallings, a renegade Catholic priest (who got himself ordained as an Archbishop by Emmanuel Milingo, a sympathetic excommunicated Catholic Archbishop).
The Vatican of course doesn’t recognize these churches, but at least one of them (Imani) passes muster with the Apostolic Continuity test. Stallings was ordained by someone who was ordained by someone who was (this goes on for the better part of two millennia) ordained by one of the 12 Apostles. Like mainstream Protestant clergy, the Vatican recognizes this is a Christian denomination with some legitimacy, just not under the Roman Catholic Church banner. This could be a sticking point in your wanting to found a new Catholic parish out of whole cloth; Ordination from that mail-order church in the classified ads of Rolling Stone really won’t cut it.
You can call your church anything you like. There are plenty of entirely legitimate churches which employ the word “Catholic” in their chosen name for themselves which are not in eucharistic communion with the Bishop of Rome.
In the US, at any rate, the courts would be very reluctant to intervene in a dispute over whether a particular church can properly call itself “Catholic”. That’s essentially a theological dispute, and for constitutional reasons the courts feel that the arbitration of theological disputes it outside their competence.
Don’t bother to start from scratch. You can be like St. Stanislaus Kostka in St. Louis.
Start with a declining church the hierarchy wants to close.
Recruit your own priest, with his own ideas about ordination of women, married men and gays.
Try to negotiate with the hierarchy to be recognized.
When that fails, have your priest and the church board be excommunicated.
Become a hero to disaffected former Roman Catholics and others.
Just be sure to keep scrupulous financial records and file the appropriate tax forms. It’s one thing to mess with the Roman Catholic Church, but you want to stay away from pissing off the IRS.
With enough money you could certainly buy a church, buy some vestments and holy water, and start handing out wafers every day and call yourself catholic.
The government does have some rules about what constitutes a church/religion, and if you don’t meet those standards, you won’t get a tax exemption. Here’s a start for you – the IRS Tax Guide for Churches and Religious Organizations