. . . on ticking the right boxes
AROUND THIS TIMElast year, I sent off my defection letter. I didn't realise it then but I got it to the archbishop's palace in the nick of time. Had I waited even a matter of weeks to count myself out, I would now be like many others who have been left in a kind of limbo by the Catholic church which, because of changes in canon law, has since confirmed that it's no longer possible to formally defect.
I was helped to defect by the groundbreaking website countmeout.ie, which was set up in response to the Murphy/Ryan reports. The website gave a handy three-step guide to leaving the church and, after following the guide, I was subsequently granted a formal defection. Should I ever find myself back at my old parish church trawling through the baptismal records, I will be able to locate what looks, in the photocopy I was sent, like the word “defecto” scrawled beside my name. It makes no practical difference to my life, but I am grateful to the Catholic powers-that-be that they formally acknowledged my rejection of their religion.
You can still defect by the way. They just won’t formally recognise your wishes. According to countmeout.ie, which has temporarily suspended its service since the changes to canon law, the church now maintains a register to note the expressed desire of those who wish to leave. This isn’t the same as a formal defection but it’s going to save the church here and across the world an awful lot of man hours and a paperwork mountain. A smart if irritating move, Benedict.
Question Number 12 on the census, which most of us will sit down to fill in tomorrow night, got me thinking again about my “defecto” status and the religious status of fellow citizens who, while they may never bother to attempt defection, have long since rejected Catholicism or whatever other faith they were handed at birth.
The question reads “What is your religion?” – a very different question to “What is the religion you were born into?”, which is one interpretation that has been made. Writing in this newspaper last week, a humanist commentator suggested that enumerators had been told to tell those with Question 12-related queries to just put down the religion of their childhood.
Brian Whiteside wrote: “ . . . on the question of religion the enumerators have been instructed to guide people to fill in the form to reflect their background rather than their current position”. In one comment posted online after the article, a woman wrote of being told by her enumerator to write down Catholic because that is what she was baptised even though it had been years since the woman had considered herself to be one. I was amazed. Clearly, for many people born into a religion, that religion remains their faith until they die. But many other people grow up, lose their religion, find God, change religion, forsake all others to worship Cheryl Cole/Justin Bieber, or all of the above. Are enumerators really being trained to tell citizens they should ignore their current spiritual affiliations, or indeed their godlessness, and revert back for one night only to the religion of their birth?
Well, no, according to Deirdre Cullen, a senior statistician with responsibility for the census, who I rang, bubbling with righteous indignation. Cullen is one of life’s eminently sensible people. She talked me down from my fulminations and confirmed that, despite other interpretations, Question 12 is essentially “What religion are you now?” and most definitely not: “What is the religion given to you by your parents?”
As a further aid to us form fillers, within half an hour she had added the following crucial paragraph to the Question 12 explanatory note on census.ie: "People should respond to this question according to how they feel now about their religious beliefs or lack thereof." Those are my celebratory italics.
Why is this clarification so important? Because the census is supposed to give an accurate reflection of the society we live in at the time the forms are filled in. Because the religion we were born into is not some kind of tattoo, cultural or spiritual, that can never be removed. Because if those of us who aren’t Catholics any more are honest about it, the statistics will, as Whiteside also wrote, provide a strong argument for the increased provision of multi-denominational schools. Because the pope – the earth-bound boss of all Catholics – holds the view that believing in the basic tenets and attempting to live by them is kind of crucial to calling oneself a Catholic. And surely it’s worth reflecting on all this when answering “What is your religion?”, instead of just ticking the most immediately obvious but possibly inaccurate box.
For the record “No Religion” is option 7 and there’s also a box for “other” into which you can put anything from Christian to Vulcan to Belieber. Each citizen’s own interpretation of whether or not they currently belong to a religion is the only one that counts.
In this we should simply be guided by the same value we will apply when filling out the rest of the form: honesty.
In other news . . .I am coming inexcusably late to the Adele party but can't stop listening to her latest album and singing Someone Like Youin the shower. Hope all you people with tickets to see her on Tuesday night know how very lucky you are