@ManifestDestinee
@HoldingTheDoor
The Guardian article HoldingTheDoor posted is clearly written by a very angry person intent on jousting windmills, who believes anyone cares about numbers of people baptised.
The author also seems to believe the RC church holds temporal power. This is revealed in the use of the Finnish example of deregistering form church membership. Finnish citizens who are members of either the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland or the Finnish Orthodox Church (the two Finnish national churches) see some of their taxes go to pay for their churches.
Yes, it certainly might be galling to unwillingly support an organisation you no longer felt yourself to be a member of. It's a real problem and hence the ability to deregister. It's also not at all analogous to the RC church. The Finnish national churches performed civil administration functions until the end of the 20th century, maintaining records of births, marriages, and deaths which are now undertaken by the state. There was a separate civil registration system for those who preferred not to consider themselves members of the two national churches during the 20th century.
The relevant elements of what the RC church does when faced with a demand for expunging the record of baptism is exactly what the Archdiocese in Australia did - noted on the record “Considers himself not a Catholic and wants not to be dealt with as one.”
That is absolutely all it can do. The rest of the disengagement is up to the individual who considers him or herself not a Catholic.
Renunciation forces the Catholic church to listen to what it refuses to hear: I reject your claim of authority over me. You cannot tell me what to do or think, how to live, whom I love or marry, what I do with my body. I am gone and you will do me this courtesy: stay the hell out of my life.
This is clearly very angry and it is also nonsense.
How free from any elements of a RC upbringing or education or immersion in RC culture an individual feels him or herself to be as a baptised Catholic is entirely up to him or her. Millions and millions of baptised Catholics all around the world feel themselves completely untrammeled by any strictures or claims of the Church.
You have free will. You are free to consider yourself not a Catholic. Nobody is forcing you to consider yourself one. Nobody is occupying your heart or your mind, making you do or think anything you don't want to do or think. In the words of the Bob Marley song, 'None but ourselves can free our minds'.
You can thumb your nose at whatever power you believe the RC church has.
You can thumb your nose at whatever power you believe the RC church believes it has.