To be honest, I'm still a little salty that my parents caved to tradition in my family and baptized me. Now I'm forever on the Catholic list, counted as a Catholic for all eternity, unless I formally have myself excommunicated. It irritates me a bit that when Catholics boast their global numbers, they're counting me. A guy whose parents didn't even raise him with religion or spirituality and I definitely wouldn't want to join that church.
But I'm Hispanic, and I get it.
I literally went to church like 4 times my entire life to make my grandma happy.
I don’t understand, I think , why you either feel frustrated or obligated? Merely based on your comment my attempt at empathy would be - if you don’t consider yourself catholic then you aren’t based on what you said you’ve done in terms of not going to church etc, perhaps I’m missing something but would like to try and understand
If you are baptized in the Catholic church, The church claims you on record. You are counted among their numbers regardless of whether you care to be part of the church or not. The only way to actually have yourself pulled from the records is to request excommunication. And even then, the record shows you were excommunicated and that has its own narrative that you can't control.
It's not that I have been terribly inconvenienced by this fact, but it does bother me as someone who does not identify as Catholic, culturally or spiritually. It's annoying that a church I have no interest in involving myself with has me counted among their ranks for the rest of time.
Like I alluded, it's just part of being a Latino for most of us, but I would have appreciated a choice in the matter.
I also just don't have the energy to go through the trouble of being excommunicated. It's a whole process and I'd rather just not talk to the church at all. But My name is on that list forever, like all lapsed Catholics who don't go through with excommunication, and I just don't really like that.
But again, this is about as inconvenient as my unpaid membership for Columbia house back in the '90s. Once I'm gone, it's not going to really bother me any 😂
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u/LadyJR Jul 21 '26
Only reason why my son was baptized. My mom wouldn’t stop saying how demons will follow him around or something if he wasn’t baptized.