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How to make an apostasy? I was baptized without my consent and I haven’t practiced for a very long time. It is time for me to renounce by apostasy this organization which no longer means anything to my thoughts.
John Paul Bourgeois
You are obviously not alone in asking yourself this question, Mr. Bourgeois. In the wake of the many scandals that have shaken the Catholic Church in recent years, several dioceses have confirmed it to us: requests for apostasy are on the rise.
Apostasy is the act by which a baptized person denies his faith and breaks with the Church. The Church is essentially being asked to remove his name from its membership roll.
To do so, it is sufficient in principle to send a written letter to the diocese in which you were baptized explaining that you wish to leave the Catholic Church. In 2021, the columnist of the Duty Émilie Nicolas has however shown from testimonies that the steps can vary from one diocese to another.1. Some dioceses require the baptistry and the signatures of two witnesses to be provided. Others ask for confirmation of intentions after receiving the letter or go so far as to make a phone call or send for a visit from a priest.
If you type “apostasy Quebec” into Google, you quickly come across the website of the Humanist Association of Quebec, a group of atheists and agnostics who have given themselves the mission of facilitating the process for those who want to leave from the church.
The site displays a link to a printable apostasy form, which includes the signature of two witnesses2.
“It’s not mandatory, but it allows you to forget nothing,” says Michel Virard, spokesperson for the movement.
There are no official statistics on apostasy for all of Quebec, but some reports in the Quebec media have reported a recent increase in requests in certain dioceses.
It must be said that the Catholic Church has not had good press for several years. More recently, the show Investigation de Radio-Canada returned to rapes, suspicious deaths and disappearances that occurred in residential schools in Quebec and the United States.
In the summer of 2021, Canadians also learned with horror of the tragedy of residential schools.
In Sherbrooke, for example, Radio-Canada reported last summer that the diocese had been receiving about five requests per month for two years, compared to about ten per year previously.3.
Our appeals lodged in some dioceses confirm the phenomenon.
“We notice an increase in requests for apostasy in recent years. We receive a few dozen requests a year in our diocese, which has a population of several hundred thousand baptized people,” says Valérie Roberge-Dion, director of communications for the Catholic Church of Quebec, for example.
“There is an increase, for sure. For the past year or two, we have seen a lot of them, ”we are also told at the diocese of Saint-Jean-Longueuil, on the South Shore. In Montreal, we even talk about a “fashion”.
In Quebec, M.me Roberge-Dion affirms that the reasons justifying the apostasies are not always specified. When this is the case, she notes that many wish to join other religious groups that make apostasy a condition of admission, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“We sometimes read in the requests that people do not agree with the choice of baptism made by their parents and wish to do another now. Others mention that they do not identify with what the Church proposes or represents [valeurs, positions, enseignements, etc.]. Cases of sexual abuse are mentioned on occasion. The involvement of Church members in the residential school system has been raised in some other applications,” she wrote.
However, she wishes to point out that many adults do the opposite by asking for confirmation or adult baptism to enter the Church.