Catholic, Yes. Practising? Not Necessarily.
Baptism, leaving the Church and the peculiar accounting of faith
A few days ago, the Centro Studi Livatino published an interesting article entitled “The Church’s Right Not to Forget”, discussing formal departure from the Church and Case C-12/25, Bisdom Gent, currently pending before the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Stripped to its essentials, the case is this. Someone baptised as a child leaves the Catholic Church as an adult and asks for their data to be erased from the baptismal register. The diocese does not delete the baptism but records the departure in the margin. The Belgian court asks whether this complies with the GDPR and, in particular, whether the right to erasure can be limited by the register’s historical character and the religious organisation’s autonomy.
Livatino’s argument has force; dismissing it as mere clerical resistance to privacy would be wrong. Baptism is indeed an event that occurred. If I was baptised in 1970, I may later become atheist, Buddhist or devoted exclusively to Bertrand Russell, but I cannot claim the parish priest did not pour water over my head that day. Italy’s data protection authority reasoned similarly as early as 1999: the register records an actual event belonging both to the individual’s biography and the Church organisation’s history. From that perspective, allowing the Church to remember it is far from unreasonable.
The problem begins, however, when we move almost imperceptibly from “this person was baptised” to “this person is Catholic”. The former describes a historical fact; the latter attributes present membership. That distinction makes this considerably more interesting than an argument about correction fluid in parish registers.
Consider history’s most famous baptism. Jesus was not baptised as a child. John baptised him as an adult, aged about thirty. We must, of course, avoid a crude theological simplification: Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan is not simply identical to the Christian sacrament subsequently developed by the Church, and describing Jesus as a convert to Christianity would make no sense. Nevertheless, the fact remains culturally significant: early Christianity initially spread through adult conversion.
Catholic doctrine itself describes the original process of Christian initiation as proclamation, acceptance of the Gospel, conversion and profession of faith, followed by baptism. Where Christianity is first proclaimed, adult baptism remains the normal model, and the catechumenate exists precisely to develop the candidate’s conversion and faith.
Institutionally, however, this model has an obvious drawback: converting adults is difficult. Adults already have beliefs, habits, family ties and cultural identities, perhaps another religion or none. Change entails what we would now call switching costs: cognitive, social, emotional and sometimes economic costs. Add status quo bias, our natural tendency to regard what we already are as normal.
None of us solemnly gathers the family on turning eighteen to announce: “After long reflection, I have decided to continue speaking Italian.” There is no need. Italian was already there.
Infant baptism has an extraordinarily powerful institutional effect. Religion ceases to be merely a choice to embrace and becomes a starting condition from which one may later withdraw. First one enters the community; then one grows up within it. We need not imagine shadowy third-century councils presenting PowerPoint slides on infant customer retention. Institutions do not need conspiracies to preserve practices that support continuity. In modern terms, this is path dependence: a successful solution becomes established and progressively more costly to abandon.
Tertullian offers an important reminder that infant baptism was not an obvious, undisputed feature of earliest Christianity. Around the year 200, in De baptismo, he clearly knew of infant baptism, so portraying it as a medieval invention would be historically wrong. But he did not regard it as inevitable: he openly recommended delaying baptism on account of age, particularly for young children.
This evidence avoids both caricatures. Infant baptism is ancient, but cannot simply be projected backwards as an undisputed practice to Jesus and the apostles. The modern Catechism itself is cautious: it states that infant baptism is expressly attested from the second century and regards it as merely possible that households baptised in the apostolic age included children.
As infant baptism became established, a striking reversal occurred. Adult conversion places instruction, faith and decision before baptism; infant baptism comes first, with instruction afterwards. The Catechism itself therefore expressly recognises the need for a post-baptismal catechumenate.
Put somewhat irreverently, but not entirely inaccurately: acquire the member first, explain the programme afterwards.
For centuries this worked extremely well. Catholic family, baptised child, catechism, communion, confirmation, religious marriage, more baptised children: religion passed down with family and culture, without each generation needing to be won over afresh. The interesting point is that this chain is now breaking, while baptism remains.
Censis research commissioned for the Italian Church’s own Synodal Path found that 71.1% of Italians still call themselves Catholic. An impressive figure—until the next figures: only 15.3% describe themselves as practising Catholics, 34.9% participate only occasionally in Church life, and 20.9% occupy the familiar category of “non-practising Catholic”. Among those aged eighteen to thirty-four, practising Catholics fall to 10.9%.
“Non-practising Catholic” is sociologically clear and possible under canon law: baptism does not disappear because someone prefers Sunday-morning padel to Mass. Yet it is a curious category: sufficiently Catholic to count in Catholic statistics, but not sufficiently observant to meet an obligation the Church itself regards as binding. Canon 1247 requires the faithful to attend Sunday Mass, and the Catechism describes deliberate failure without serious reason as a grave sin.
Statistics, in this respect, seem considerably more merciful than moral theology.
To understand the transformation of Italian Catholicism, however, self-description is not enough. We must examine indicators requiring action. In the early 2000s, around 36% of Italians reported attending a place of worship at least weekly; today that share is roughly half as large, while the proportion reporting never attending has almost doubled. Religious marriage is also declining rapidly: in 2024, over 61% of Italian marriages were civil, and civil ceremonies now outnumber religious ones even among first marriages.
An even more revealing indicator measures not vague cultural identification but willingness to devote one’s entire life to the Church’s continuity: priestly vocations.
Here the decline is much harder to soften with words. Italy had over 6,300 seminarians in 1970; by 2019, just over 2,100, with subsequent counts showing further falls among diocesan seminarians. Across Europe, major seminarians fell by over 38% between 2013 and 2024. These are not merely less flattering percentages in a spreadsheet: seminaries are merging or closing because too few candidates remain to sustain separate institutions. Dioceses combine their seminarians at one location, while establishments built for dozens or hundreds of future priests now have very small numbers.
Seminaries are an especially demanding indicator because they measure something baptism cannot: the institution’s capacity to reproduce itself. Entering a seminary requires more than a decision your parents made when you were three months old. It requires a personal, adult commitment whose depth is hard to misunderstand.
It is precisely when membership requires a costly choice that Catholic numbers plummet.
A striking paradox emerges. The Church may retain an enormous population culturally or sacramentally connected to Catholicism while practising members, religious marriages, priests and especially aspiring priests decline rapidly. Baptism thus displays a resilience that actual Church life no longer possesses.
While this remains within canon law, one could say it is no concern of the state. If the Church considers baptism an indelible mark, a secular state has no authority to debate grace’s sacramental effect. The issue changes when religious organisations’ social presence becomes relevant under civil law.
Italy’s Constitutional Court has long recognised that allocating land and funding for places of worship may legitimately take account of different faiths’ actual local presence and religious needs. Article 73 of Lombardy Regional Law No. 12/2005 is more explicit: a share of secondary urbanisation charges funds religious facilities, and allocation among faiths must consider their “size and social significance within the municipality”.
At that point, who is actually “Catholic” ceases to be purely an ecclesiological question. It may become one of planning, administration and, inevitably, money.
Rigour is essential. No rule requires a mayor to use baptismal registers to allocate land or funding, nor do we have evidence that the Church refuses erasure to inflate its representativeness. That would be a striking but unproven accusation.
Indeed, Italy’s data protection authority had already established in 1999 that once someone expresses a wish to leave a faith, they can no longer be treated as a member in subsequent statistical activities either.
This raises a surprisingly interesting technical question. Formal departure is usually annotated in the baptismal register held by an individual parish; meanwhile the Church publishes aggregate statistics counting millions of “baptised Catholics”. Through what procedure is that local annotation passed upwards and converted into the individual’s removal from membership statistics?
Publicly available methodological sources do not make this step transparent. That does not mean subtraction never happens. It means that, if the register’s entire defence rests on distinguishing historical memory from current membership, it would be useful to know how that distinction is actually maintained in the numbers.
The debate over “the Church’s right not to forget” risks obscuring precisely this point. The Church may have excellent reasons to retain a record that someone was baptised. The GDPR itself permits religious organisations, within specific limits, to process former members’ data. That legislative distinction between members and former members already conveys something elementary: retaining a record of past membership does not mean one may continue presenting someone as a current member.
“Was baptised” and “is Catholic” are not synonyms. The first concerns a past event; the second a person’s present identity. Since parents chose that original event when the individual could not choose, it is particularly difficult to give it greater force than that same individual’s contrary decision as an adult.
Perhaps this is where formal departure becomes a symbol of something larger. For centuries, infant baptism meant the Church did not have to win over every generation: membership preceded choice, and society made it seem natural. Today, however, when we ask Italians not merely whether they feel broadly Catholic, but whether they attend Mass, marry in church or enter a seminary, we discover a much smaller Church than nominal membership suggests.
The Church may certainly continue to maintain that baptism is indelible before God. But sacramental permanence cannot automatically imply social or statistical permanence.
Perhaps that is the real issue raised by Bisdom Gent: not whether a faith may retain the memory of a sacrament actually celebrated, but how far it may continue deriving a present classification of someone from that fact after the person, now an adult, expressly chooses no longer to identify with it.
Religious freedom is not merely the ability to enter a faith. It is also the ability, once capable of choosing, to be taken seriously when deciding to leave.
Paolo Fortina · Originally published on LinkedIn on 20 August 2026. Read the original
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