Thousands of Dutch Catholics Seek to "De-Baptize" Over Pope's Anti-Gay Statements

In a movement that I would like to see really take root in America, thousands of Dutch Roman Catholics are seeking to "de-baptize" themselves and formally leave the Roman Catholic Church.  The movement has taken on steam after Pope Benedict' recent claims that gay marriage threaten humanity and similar hate filled batshitery.  By "de-baptizing" individuals formally leave the Church which has them stricken from Church membership rosters and bars the Church from carrying inflated membership numbers.  Simply no longer attending church services does not get one removed from the membership roles - a phenomenon that allows the Church to publicly claim that its membership numbers are not tanking as individuals flee the Church's Medieval social strictures.  (I had myself formally removed from the membership roster of the Diocese of Richmond a number of years ago).  Here are highlights from Yahoo News:

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Thousands of Dutch Catholics are researching how they can leave the church in protest at its opposition to gay marriage, according to the creator of a website aimed at helping them find the information.

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.

In a Christmas address to Vatican officials, the pope signaled the he was ready to forge alliances with other religions against gay marriage, saying the family was threatened "to its foundations" by attempts to change its "true structure".

Roes, a television director, said he left the church and set up his website partly because he was angry about the way the church downplayed or covered-up sexual abuse in Catholic orphanages, boarding schools and seminaries.

A report by an independent commission published a year ago said there had been tens of thousands of victims of child sexual abuse in the Netherlands since 1945 and criticized the church's culture of silence.

Benedict XVI - who engaged in cover ups himself in Germany - is fine with sexual abuse of minors by priests as long as the story does go public, but recognizing committed, loving same sex couples through CIVIL laws is a threat to the family and humanity itself.  The man is beyond horrible.