Just a week after Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister Frans Timmermans blasted Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican about claiming to respect everyone’s uniqueness while simultaneously spreading hatred against gays and lesbians comes the news that Dutch Catholics are flocking to the “debaptism” movement in which Catholics request that their names formally be stricken from the memberships rolls of their local diocese over the Pope and the Vatican’s anti-gay hatred.
Tom Roes, whose website allows people to download the documents needed to leave the church, said traffic on ontdopen.nl – “de-baptise.nl” – had soared from about 10 visits a day to more than 10,000 after Pope Benedict’s latest denunciation of gay marriage this month. “Of course it’s not possible to be ‘de-baptized’ because a baptism is an event, but this way people can unsubscribe or de-register themselves as Catholics,” Roes told Reuters. He said he did not know how many visitors to the site actually go ahead and leave the church. About 28 percent of the population in the Netherlands is Catholic and 18 percent is Protestant, while a much larger proportion – roughly 44 percent – is not religious, according to official statistics. The country is famous for its liberal attitudes, for example to drugs and prostitution, and in April 2001 it was the first nation in the world to legalize same-sex marriages.
In case anyone in America is interested you can get your very own De-Baptismal certificate here: www.ffrf.org
I love this story and have a similar wish in America. I wish American Catholics (particularly gays and women) would break from Rome and create the Catholic Church of America. A majority of the annual income to Rome comes from America. If America would make the break from Rome then that old Prada wearing queen would sing a new tune would he can no longer afford designer shoes. The point is, Americans can change the bigotry coming out of Rome if American Catholics would only demand change.