The Belgian Catholic Church is contesting a decision made by Belgium’s Data Protection Authority, which seeks to force the Diocese to delete from their Catholic baptism registers the name of a person who has requested to be “de-baptized.” "
It is an aberration with regard to Catholic theology and Church law.
It all started in the diocese of Ghent at the end of 2023: a Catholic who had started a “de-baptism” process demanded that his name also be erased from the Catholic registers, which the Church has always refused to do.
Since baptism is a sacrament which imprints a permanent character on the soul of those who receive it, the sacrament cannot under any circumstances be “erased.”
To deal with this type of request, the Church generally makes a note in the margins of the baptismal record of what canon law defines as a “formal apostasy from the Faith.”
Faced with the refusal of the diocese of Ghent to erase his name from the baptismal register, the Belgian Data Protection Authority (DPA) was contacted and rendered its decision on December 19, 2023.
It considers that the Church is certainly within its rights to preserve the names of people baptized within it, but that “this interest cannot always be invoked from the moment the person expresses his or her wish to leave the Church and see their baptism data erased.”
In other words, according to the DPA, the attitude of the Church would constitute an infringement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which regulates the processing of personal data since May 2018 within the European Union. (EU).
In the eyes of the DPA, “from the point of view of data protection, the lifelong processing of data, moreover of a sensitive nature, of a person who has asked to leave the Church cannot be justified if this processing is neither proportional nor strictly necessary to the interests… of the Church.”
The Diocese of Ghent has decided to appeal the decision: “we want to go to the end,” explains the spokesperson for the Conference of Bishops of Belgium. Fr. Tommy Scholtès adds that he “will not contest the final decision” and says he is “saddened by the phenomenon of debaptism” which continues to plague the country.
While the Church remains discreet about the figures, requests for “debaptism” oscillate between one to two thousand per year between 2019 and 2022, with a peak in 2021, the year during which five thousand requests were recorded.
The matter is now in the hands of the European Union: the Church's adversaries can count on the support of Belgian MEP Kathleen Van Brempt, member of the left-wing Vooruit party, who believes that “the rules of European law must apply to everyone – including the Church.”
In France, by a decision rendered on Friday, February 2, 2024, the Council of State rejected the request of a person asking the diocese of Angers to remove his name from the baptismal register.