SUMMARY
The Roman Catholic Church says that baptism puts a seal on you that makes you belong to the Church forever. But belonging to the Church means it has the right to have you as a member. It does not mean you are a member. Membership is a two way thing.
Suppose you have a gold watch that you inherited from your uncle who gave it to you on the condition that you would never sell it or give it away. You go and sell it. You are obligated to keep the watch. But once you sell it, it is no longer your watch. In the same way, belonging to the Church is not the same as being a member.
The notion that your DNA makes you a member of your family thus baptism gives you spiritual DNA making you a member of the Church is absurd. Your DNA makes you share something with your parents and brothers and sisters etc. But a family has to be built independent of that. DNA does not make a family - love does. The Church itself would reject the notion of spiritual DNA as the soul is immaterial - that is it is not made of matter. If baptism really puts a seal on you, the seal indicates, "Obligated to be a member." Whether you really become a member is up to you.
Also, a person can be Catholic by initiation through baptism but not a Catholic by faith. Without faith you are not a real member of the faith community.
From the Encyclical Satis Cognitum Pope Leo XIII: "There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by Our Lord and handed down by apostolic tradition - Augustine. The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authorative magisterium. St Augustine notes that heresies may spring up, not to a single one of which should anyone give his assent, he is by the very fact cut off from Catholic unity. Augustine in De Haeresibus n. 88 wrote that there may be or may arise some heresies and that if anybody holds to a single one of these he is not a Catholic."
Conclusion: A person can cease to be a member of the Catholic Church.
If you are Catholic,
There are three ways of being Catholic (these apply to being a member of any religion) -
* You can be Catholic by affiliation by having your name on its books because of an initiation.
For Catholics, you can be affiliated in the eyes of the Church but in the eyes of /god you might not be Catholic at all - for example, if your baptism for some reason was invalid. So only God knows who is really baptised and initiated into the Church.
* You can be Catholic by belief.
* You can be Catholic socially.
All are necessary to be fully Catholic. If you have not been formally initiated into the Church and think you have been you may be Catholic by belief and socially but not really. Even if it is true that you are Catholic for life, it is not true that you can be a believing Catholic for life. You would be Catholic by membership but not Catholic by belief.
Most Catholics do not support the teachings of the Church.
Pope Eugene IV, Council of Florence, 1441: “The Holy Roman Church condemns,
reproves, anathematizes and declares to be outside the Body of Christ, which is
the Church, the heretic for he holds opposing or contrary views.”
They cut themselves off the community united by faith. The decree as harsh as it looks is only recognising that. It is actually respecting their choice. A Church is a community of faith and you must have its faith to be part of the community.
Catholics picking what they like out of the faith is not enough. Even atheists do that. Decent persons will not want to be counted among an organization whose beliefs they do not support. This need not be spiteful. For the church to count them as members is dishonest and disrespectful to them. Likewise, for them to be able to represent themselves as a Catholic is disingenuous and not fair to real Catholics. The Church teaches you excommunicate yourself when you commit certain offences so you cease to become Catholic when you become convinced the Church is false. Also, if the Church is false then being Catholic is certainly only a label. It is only a man-made label conferred by a man-made faith.
Church law decrees that it can be possible to defect from the Church. Those who say the practice of formal defection exempts the Catholic only from marriage law - like the Church letting a rebellious child have its own way - need to consider the following. If the Church can exempt from matrimonial law it can exempt from all of Church law or canon law. Also, defection means leaving the Church. To say it lets you marry as you wish without regard to the Church is ridiculous. It is like saying sacking somebody from their job only means you will give them no bonus at Christmas anymore. And most defectors are not interested in getting married at all. And matrimonial law in the Church is said to be moral law not just judicial law. For example, the Church cannot exempt you so that you can contract a new marriage while your first spouse is still alive. To attempt such an exemption would be invalid. Church law is overridden by divine law.
Some Catholics hold that those who were Catholics and who say they have no religion are still Catholics. They are not Catholics who simply neglect the faith but who reject and denounce their faith outright. They may unite themselves with some other faith community or become atheists. Perhaps they may even repudiate their membership in the Catholic Faith before their priest and members of their parish.
The Catholic Church has three sacraments of initiation. One is baptism. The next is confirmation in which you accept the faith. Then the Eucharist. Baptism does not give full membership. If the baby that is baptised becomes a Catholic it is largely Catholic but not totally. It becomes more Catholic at confirmation and even more again every time it gets communion. The Church says that the sacraments only become channels of holiness if the recipient lets them. The sacraments then only initiate into goodness.
If we are talking about an organisation, you are either a member or you are not.
We see from all that that the Church is not merely an organisation. Being Catholic is not just a label. Being Catholic is being good as the Lord has helped the Church understand it. In this, the good person who repudiates Catholicism is practicing the wrong kind of good. The goodness would pave the way for founding the organisation. The goodness matters more than the organisation and the organisation only exists to implement the good. To say otherwise is to teach sectarianism.
“Once a Catholic always a Catholic” and doctrines about baptism marking you as belonging to God accuse anybody who was baptised a Catholic of neglecting their duty if they want nothing to do with the faith. One would need absolute proof to have the right to say things like that. The Church is forced to admit that it does not have any such proof...
Belief Needed for Membership
A Catholic book, Unicorn in the Sanctuary - The Impact of the New Age on the Catholic Church states on page 97, "Is the Christian path the only way to achieve eternal life with God? Or are other religions valid prescriptions for other peoples? Are Hinduism, Buddhism, Mormonism and African religions valid paths to God? Let me be clear that when I speak of a Hindu, I mean one who practices orthodox Hindu religion. In the same way, a Mormon is one who follows the teachings of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. If a person calls himself a Mormon, claims allegiance to Joseph Smith, but does not believe that God the Father is a flesh and blood man or that Jesus and Lucifer were brothers, then that person is not an orthodox Mormon. If, instead, he ignores these doctrines, and begins to believe that Jesus Christ is the only-begotten Son of God who came to die for his sins, but still calls himself a Mormon, then we would find it difficult to consider him still a Mormon." The same would be true of Catholicism. Catholics believe you need a valid baptism and when you are old enough to decide for yourself you need to adhere to the entire Catholic faith to be a real Catholic.
Canon Law decrees a penalty of automatic excommunication for those who say they disbelieve or reject an infallible doctrine of the Church. For example, if you are a Catholic and you say the Pope is not the head of the Church or that marriage is a load of bollocks you are excommunicated. You are barred from the sacraments and the right to hold Church office. You are barred from the sacraments and Church office for sinning as well. To contradict the Church is a sin. So does this all mean that being excommunicated for heresy is no different at all from just being a sinner? A sinner can be a member of the Church even though barred from the sacraments and the right to hold Church office if the sin is serious enough. A heretic cannot. The heretic is not excommunicated because he or she is a sinner and has committed the sin of heresy. The heretic is excommunicated because heresy one repudiates the teaching authority of the Church and denies that the Church is teacher thus the excommunication declares that the heretic has put oneself outside the Church and is not a member. Those Catholics who contradict the Church cease to be Catholics for they are expelled by excommunication.
To put it another way, the Church says I cut myself off from the sacraments by sinning. So if I get excommunicated I will be no better or worse off. So what is the point of excommunication? It is like sacking your employee who has walked out of the job. It would be vindictive. It would show you spitefully want rid. The only way around this is to consider the fact that excommunicate means you are not in communion or union with the Church anymore. Excommunication puts you out of unity with the Church.
A religion that declares people who have undergone some ritual are members even if they don't believe and no matter what they do is not even loyal to itself. It is self-destruction. The Christian faith would disappear if baptism made you a member of the Church and what you believed and did made no difference. What would you say to the man who upon hearing of Muhammad said he was a Muslim and made no effort to join the Islamic community and said he didn't believe Muhammad was a prophet and didn't believe in the Koran? You could say nothing if you think faith and genuine membership of a religion don't necessarily go together. If they don't, then the Catholic has the right to claim to be Catholic while saying the Mass is rubbish and nobody should attend it. He would be whatever he called himself? What then if he decided that he was pope?
Labelling Odious
Labelling is an awful practice. It is odious. To label is an attempt to put you in a box, to stereotype you. It is very serious if a religion says you belong to it and should obey its authority just because you went through some initiation ceremony even if you have abjured that religion. The religion is very arrogant. The religion would need to have very strong proof that its ceremony confers such permanent membership and those obligations. Catholicism doesn't have the proof. If it teaches once a Catholic always a Catholic no matter how hard you try not to be then it should be laughed at. But it would be a very insulting teaching. It would be a form of forced conversion. To consider a person who joins a new religion to be still a member of your own would be like forcing membership on them or wishing you could. It would legitimise a form of forced conversion. You might have other reasons why you would not force them to convert such as fear of the law and the anti-cult brigade. But that does not change the fact that part of you agrees with force. To wish you could force is enjoying your attraction to violence. The violence in this case is a wish to see others forced to become Catholics. The less sensible evidence you have for your religion the more this violence is present.
Catholic Labelling is Particularly Odious
The once a Catholic always a Catholic proverb is just bigoted rubbish. It implies that being Catholic is some kind of default and being anything else is perverted and wrong. That attitude would be extreme arrogance. A religion founded on it is not a religion of virtue but of false virtue. It would be guilty of those who consider Catholicism harmful and superstitious.
Jesus said that we must serve God with all our heart, body and mind. This indicates that our role as servants of God is not part of us. It is all of us. If we fail, we are not living up to what we are. He clearly then authorised the evil practice of pretending that there is not more to a person than their faith or religious affiliation.
Bizarrely, Christianity refuses to accept this doctrine. If it did, it would have to abandon all ecumenical activities. The Church says it prays with Muslims, for example, to celebrate what Christianity and Muslims have in common without glossing over the differences. But if the Church sees Muslims as Muslims rather than as persons this friendship will not be possible for it means they are identical with what is seen as a false religion by the Catholic Church.
Jesus himself did not believe the doctrine for he claimed that the bad Jews were not children of Abraham - in other words not real Jews at all.
It is complete arrogance to suppose that if you baptise a child that the child will be a Catholic for all eternity whether he or she grows up to believe in Catholicism or not. It is a bigoted supposition and can only lead to bigotry. It implies that being baptised a Catholic is like some kind of default. It implies that being anything else means nothing and is somehow bad.
To say once a Catholic always a Catholic is to say that everybody should be a Catholic for if Catholics cannot stop being Catholics no matter what they do then the Catholic Church must be special if it can have that much authority over a person that it still owns them no matter if they leave it or not! It is to automatically insult all other faiths. It is to proclaim the Catholic Church to be the instrument of God while all other institutions are merely human. It is to hand the child over to the control of the priesthood.
Church Does Not Teach "Once a Catholic Always a Catholic"
The view that once a Catholic always a Catholic is popular among Catholics but does not fit Catholic teaching or canon law. In Canon Law you are a lapsed Catholic if you don't practice and you become a non-Catholic if you convert to another religion. The Church accepts the concept of apostasy, Catholics ceasing to be Catholics. The Church teaches that you always belong to the Church if you are baptised but that is not the same as saying you will always be a member. If you belong to Jesus, that does not mean you are a member of his Church no matter what you believe and do. A dog may belong in my house and not be there and wander off and be lost. A sheep may belong to the flock and the flock may be waiting the lost sheep coming back even though the sheep will no longer be a member of the flock. The once a Catholic always a Catholic kind of attitude is a boast that this organisation, the Catholic Church is so special that it can hardly be considered to be a human organisation but divine. You don't say that if somebody is a member of a club they are always a member. You don't say once a doctor always a doctor. Since you don't, if you say once a Catholic always a Catholic then you don't put as much value on being a doctor as being a Catholic and that is bigoted and fanatical and downright evil. You are saying an initiation rite that makes Catholics is more important than a man studying and working to help others.
If you can be received into the Catholic Church if you are validly baptised a Protestant, then you can certainly reverse this reception. You can become un-received. You can leave the Church. You can formally defect. Canon Law speaks of formal defection from the Catholic Church and recognises it.
Those who say Once a Catholic Always a Catholic are often not Catholics or authentic Catholics themselves! They deny what Canon Law says about excommunication. If you can pick and choose what you like out of Catholicism then why can't you do the same with Islam and claim to be a member of both religions? Religion would collapse if picking and choosing was right! There would be no real point in worrying about religious membership at all then!
The Mark
Valid baptism is supposed to leave a mark on your soul to show that you have been baptised and because of the mark you will never need your baptism to be repeated.
The Bible does not mention the alleged mark. The Roman Catholic Church claims to be infallible. In the following infallible decree it speaks of the mark.
The mark must be metaphorical for the soul can't literally bear a mark. The Church says the soul is non-physical and has no parts. This is Church dogma. Therefore putting two and two together the mark is a metaphor for God considering a person validly baptised once and for all.
The baptism cannot be repeated. You are in God's book as baptised - ie having gone through the ceremony validly. The mark comes with the graces or supernatural healing effects of baptism but does not cause them. It is God that gives the healing and the spiritual benefits of baptism and you don't need a mark to get them.
Even if you have received a true baptism the mark has nothing to do with activating the supernatural effects. The effects is a separate issue. The Church believes you can be validly married but if you are full of sin you will not activate the sacramental powers of marriage. It must be the same with baptism. The important thing about the baptism is the supernatural life transforming power given to those who are baptised. This power can be received and rejected over and over again. It is like you are continually baptising yourself over and over again but without the water. The physical outer baptism is not to be repeated but the inner baptism is repeatable.
Now, the Church claims to teach that body and soul make up the complete person. That is why God raises body and soul from the dead. The body has no mark signifying baptism. Through baptism into the Catholic Church a visible Church, an organisation can be set up. It is bizarre that no mark is put by God on the body. What use is a mark nobody can see?
There is only one baptism in the eyes of the Church and that is Catholic baptism. Even if a Protestant is validly baptised, it is because he got a Catholic baptism though everybody meant it to be a non-Catholic one.
The Church says it has no authority to repeat a baptism known to be valid. That is why when Presbyterians or Methodists become Catholics, they will not be baptised if they were baptised before in their Churches. The Church believes that people who are baptised properly but who were not raised in the Catholic Church need to be received into the Church. Membership of the Catholic Church is declared to be conferred by baptism or by the Church receiving a person who was baptised a Protestant and also raised a Protestant into its fold. Ideas such as once a Catholic always a Catholic insults those who have a recognised baptism but who were not baptised Catholics and who need to be received into the Church. They are received into the Church as if they were outside of it. They become Catholics, despite their Protestant baptism being considered to have been valid, by being accepted into the Church in a formal ceremony after an appropriate period of religious instruction and preparation. If baptism is really enough to make one a Catholic then it would follow that instead of being received into the Catholic Church, Protestants need only say they believe in Catholicism and start attending Catholic sacraments and stop attending Protestant Churches. Receiving into the Church would be replaced by a welcome back ceremony if the Church sincerely believed that baptism puts you into the Catholic Church. The Church says it believes that valid baptism always puts one into the Catholic Church and the receiving ceremony denies this.
What does the Mark Do?
The Church says that baptism marks you forever as belonging to Jesus Christ. This denies that unbaptised people belong to Jesus. It accuses those who belong but who refuse to belong of being evil whether they realise it is evil or not.
A mark can't make you belong to anybody. To say it can is insulting. All the mark can be is that a person was baptised. All the grace of baptism and all the rights can be renounced and lost. Then the mark would show only that the baptismal graces and rights can be restored but not that the person really belongs to Jesus or the Church.
To belong to God by baptism means you belong to him and should become a member. There is another way it means you are his. If it takes away your sin it makes you belong to him in a stronger way than that. To belong to God by baptism this way means that if you are clean from sin you are his. The angels then belong to God because they are clean though they have not being baptised. The only difference between you and the angel is how you got the holiness. The holiness cannot mark you as belonging to God forever. It can only mark you as belonging to God as long as you obey.
If baptism marks you as belonging to the Church, that does not mean you are a member of the Church. Belonging only means that you have a duty to be a member not that you are a member. Those who are not baptised then do not belong to God or the Church - they are rejected. They are treated differently though it is not their fault. The Church teaches that those Catholics who commit mortal sin are like branches broken off the vine but hanging by a tiny sliver. So the degree you are a member is reduced by the degree you sin. The apostate is the branch that has fallen off and will stay fallen off until he or she is restored by faith and repentance.
To impose a duty to belong to a particular religion on a child is evil. The Church says that to refuse to go to Mass without a real reason such as sickness or having to look after a sick relative is a mortal sin. The baby is obligated to go to Mass when he grows up. Is it right to force such an obligation on the child when it makes him a bad person if he does not go?
If there is a duty, you will be able to provide proof that there is a duty. Nature writes the proof that we must look after our ailing parents or see that they are provided for. It writes that duty on our nature. But to say there is a duty to follow Catholicism is ridiculous. You may as well say there is a duty to say magic words over your car every morning. Once a Catholic always a Catholic implies you have a duty to call yourself Roman Catholic even though you have gone through a process of conversion to Presbyterianism and don't believe in Catholicism. It is harassment to tell somebody they have a duty unless you can prove the existence of the duty.
Forced Membership?
A choice made for you is not as binding as a choice you make for yourself. If you were baptised a Catholic as a baby without your consent, then that is less important than the decision you make as an adult to stay in or leave the Church. A choice made for you is not a choice made by you and so it cannot be called a choice at all. Those who say you are Catholic and even if you join the Hindus this is only a pretence and you are still a Catholic and a liar.
Forced conversion does not mean just forcing people to join your religion but keeping them in it. You are forcing them to renew their conversion every day.
Those who believe in once a Catholic always a Catholic take their children for baptism. Clearly they are attempting the forcing of religion on children whether its wanted or not for no matter what he or she does when he or she grows up he or she cannot stop being a Catholic! Its a mark of arrogance and intolerance to do that. It implies that it is not enough to be a good person. One needs a splash in the Catholic baptismal font as well. If you say that being good is not enough then you are criticising goodness itself! You are setting out to warp.
Baptism insults the dignity of the child as a human person. It does that naturally. Its its essence. But it is far worse when commissioned by families and priests that think in terms of once a Catholic always a Catholic. If you are a Catholic and not living it then you are sinner. That is what the thought infers. It seeks to expose the child to the judgement of the fictitious god of the Church and the Church itself and society and judgemental Catholics who love to criticise and condemn if the child grows up to neglect the Church and even leave it.
If you believe that it is wrong to proselytise or to pressure people to join your religion, then by adopting ideas such as once a Catholic always a Catholic, you are depriving people of one important reason for believing such proselytism is wrong. You are eliminating the idea: "Nobody is obliged to join your religion or worship your God. Your religion or God doesn't own anybody. Everybody owns herself or himself" as a reason for condemning it. You are lessening the reasons for condemning it. An Atheist would say that a Church cannot think of you or treat you like you have a duty to become its member like it was your property etc. Thus his opposition and perception that it is bad would be stronger than a Catholic. The Catholic, even if he or she opposes proselytism, will have weaker opposition to it. If it were the only reason for forbidding proselytism, the Church would reject it. To teach doctrines that even slightly make opposition to proselytism weaker is reprehensible. It is a crack even if the Catholic would never proselytise. Its diminishing respect for others in the name of religion.
It's God that Makes you a Member?
The Church may say that baptism makes you a member of the Church. Strictly speaking, baptism doesn't do that. It is God's choice that does that. In other words, baptism is nothing in itself. It is only that God has decreed that he will give you grace and make you a member of the Church should you validly undergo baptism that is important. Suppose a king decrees that you will only get into his charity banquet if you have a ticket. It is not the ticket that really gets you in but the king's will. See the point?
To say God chooses the baptised implies that he does not choose the unbaptised. They are rejected. The Church will retort, "They are not rejected for God will accept them if they are baptised!" That is like saying, "We do not employ black people. We do not reject them because maybe in their next reincarnation they will become white".
The paperwork method of membership should be universal
God could have decreed that once you sign a few papers you become a member of the Church - (indeed the Church says he has laid out that rule for Protestants who wish to convert). If he had it left up to us, it would have been more dignified for us and also for himself. The baptism system would be undignified.
Why Not Once-an-any-religion?
It is stupid to say people are Catholics when they don't believe in Catholicism and don't want to be affiliated with the religion or pigeon-holed with it. If you are once a Catholic always a Catholic then why not once a Jew/Mormon/Muslim then not always a Jew/Mormon/Muslim? If you convert from Catholicism to Judaism and then Mormonism and finally Islam then are you still a member of all four religions? The suggestion that you are would be absurd.
If a child is circumcised into Judaism and baptised at the same time then what religion does it belong to? It can’t belong to both. What if a new faith starts a coffee shop and has the doctrine that any child who eats its special ice lollies is automatically a member of the faith? Where is it all going to end? Clearly the Roman Catholic Church has no right to claim that a child is a member of the Roman Catholic Church by baptism. Therefore parents do not have the right to raise their children as Catholics. If they have the right to bring a child into their faith, they have to instil faith in the child by influencing the child to accept baptism. They certainly have no right to have the child baptised without her or his consent. That is imposing membership on the child.
Invalid Cancellation of Membership
Some people say that Catholics who reject the Church reject what they think the Church is not what it is. This is thought to imply that they have not really left the Church or really rejected it. Then it may be said that those people are implicit Catholics for if they knew better they would not have tried to leave.
It assumes that there is no religion better than the Catholic religion.
It also assumes that Church teaching is really good. But if it is so good, then why do even the popes not behave in a way consistent with believing all of the faith? For example, the pope should recoil and vomit when he sees Gay Pride marching in Rome if he really believes homosexuality is a sin that takes people to the place of everlasting and irrevocable punishment.
The angels belong to God from the first moment of their creation. Angels are not human so they don't contract original sin. The angels always belong to God until they turn against him like Satan did. Satan reversed his membership in God's family by sin. Adam and Eve were created as members of God's family and members of his circle of friends. We would have been too if we had no original sin. The Church teaches that beings who come into existence without original sin and who are made as holy beings cease to be members of God's family and Church upon sinning. They have to restore membership by repenting.
It seems the Church thinks if we were born sinless, we would lose our membership of the Church by sin. If that is so, it would be strange to say that if we have original sin which keeps us out of the Church and get baptised to put us into the Church we cannot lose such membership if we then fall into sin! It would make no sense. It would contradict the fact that angels belonged to God and many of them no longer belong to him and are demons. The doctrine that Adam and Eve ceased to be members of God's family and ceased to belong to him when they sinned implies that if you renounce baptism you cease to be a member of God's Church which is his family on earth.
If original sin, a sin which you have not even committed but which you carry from the first moment of your existence until its forgiven in baptism, excludes you from the Church how much more will your own sin do it?
Baptism and membership
Here are the reasons a baby cannot become a Catholic by baptism:
Even if a baby needs to be something, it does not follow that it really is a Catholic baby. It is only a baby who has got the Catholic label for the sake of giving it a label.
Catholic doctrine is serious stuff. Therefore you cannot make a valid decision to enter Catholicism knowing some of this stuff but not all. But babies know nothing at all.
If the baby has original sin, it is inclined to choose sin rather than choose God. Thus it can only become a member of the Church if forced. If it had a say it would refuse.
Unicorn in the Sanctuary, Randy England, Tan Books, Virginia, 1991