AMSTERDAM, Dec 27 (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-baptised’ because a
baptism is an event, but this way people can unsubscribe or
de-register themselves as Catholics,” Roes told Reuters.
He said he did not know how many visitors to the site
actually go ahead and leave the church.
About 28 percent of the population in the Netherlands is
Catholic and 18 percent is Protestant, while a much larger
proportion – roughly 44 percent – is not religious, according to
official statistics.
The country is famous for its liberal attitudes, for example
to drugs and prostitution, and in April 2001 it was the first in
the world to legalise same-sex marriages.
In a Christmas address to Vatican officials, the pope
signalled 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 criticised the church’s
culture of silence.
(Reporting by Sara Webb; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
