How I got Officially Unbaptised

good day Dylan odonald from the baron Bay Observatory here and you read that thumbnail and caption correctly this is a video about me being unbaptized unbaptized from the Catholic Church you're probably wondering how and why and I'll explain in that order because the how is interesting and maybe you want to do it too and the why is maybe up to you maybe you'd like to get unbaptized because your parents decided that for you but it's a good story and it's one I'd like to share so I'm going to tell you how it all went down my name is DL Donnell and you're not watching Star stuff because I'm not talking about space today look at me what a dork my mother was an immigrant to this country so like many ethnic families we were catholic and not just a little bit Catholic we were like super Catholics not just go to church on Sunday Kind of Catholic I'm talking go to church multiple times a week we prayed rosary on our knees every night we wore scapula and prayed to different Saints and I even had to go to my local neighborhood church and also to my school church so there were even more services I was so Catholic that I got First Holy Communion at school and then I had to get another First Holy Communion in my local community as well I was First Holy Communion twice it's a good thing I wasn't Jewish but anyway we're talking about pathologically insane levels of Catholicism and this photo is from my school First Holy Communion there's this one as well and I still know a lot of these kids because I went to school with them they're on my Facebook now and I still like them but I got to say maybe only one or two of them are still Catholics after all these years so long story short super Catholic I was an alter boy at my local neighborhood church and my school church and I remember like robing up with one of the other alter boys and he was like swearing and cussing and remember thinking to myself wow I'm way more holy than that kid but as a kid I was into space I was into science I was into astronomy on my wall I had posters of Einstein Metallica Dungeons and Dragons the Space Shuttle Discovery and um Bart Simpson The Simpsons before they had a season when when they're on the Tracy Elman show so very quickly I kind of realized that um the universe that I was learning with science was way bigger and more Grand and more Majestic than the small little petty Universe described in the Bible fast forward 20 years decades later I'm at my brother's house and my mother comes over with a stack of old crap like stuff like uh bad poetry bad report cards from when I was a kid scribbles cartoons and in that pile she showed me this my baptism certificate I'm going to cover up a bunch of the personal info but it has the parish that I was baptized in the date I was baptized on uh 18th of September 1983 the Reverend the witnesses my grandparents all of that now I thought that was really interesting and it got me thinking and I thought is this filed somewhere like has this been filed in a cabinet in West Australia where I was baptized and did those stats go back to the Vatican because the Vatican needs sort of numbers like those to see which areas are growing in Catholicism how they allocate Bishops and Priests things like that that was a suspicion but it turned out to be correct the Vatican does have census and statisticians and they do care about those numbers I guess it's their key performance indicators for how the local churches are doing how many kids can you push through those doors so I knew the data was somewhere and not only that I'm in that stupid data my number is there as a Catholic and I think that's overinflating the numbers I think that all of those kids at that school who have since colled maybe they're ex- Catholics maybe they're ex- religious altogether but those numbers still exist for the Catholic church and they use those numbers so I was able to look up the church I was baptized in which is here it's a dump it's not exactly the sine Chapel I decided to reach out to a local church around here and just ask them the question and say how can I revoke my baptism and they put me in touch with the local Bishop the Lismore dicese Bishop Jeffrey Jarrett now all of this was happening via email and the Reverend Jarrett insisted that we have a phone call we really need to talk this out they're not going to remove me from the Catholic Church via email alone so that was fine I scheduled the call and we had a nice little chat and I talked about my reasons and I said uh I don't really want to be in your numbers and I asked him I said can I be excommunicated from the church I knew what the the word meant and I knew that that's sort of the goal of what I was trying to do the outcome would have been the same but he said that excommunication was really reserved for if you done something against the church so I hadn't done anything extreme or violent or worthy of being excommunicated from the church I might have left out some of my um history I was actually kicked out of a Catholic School in year n for apostasy but I didn't tell him that and I don't think it would have mattered Because unless I punch the Pope in the face or something I don't think it warrants an excommunication and even then I think the pope is a pretty forgiving guy so what he suggested was that I did something called an annotation I would annotate the record in their database in their filing cabinet uh to make sure that my baptism was annulled and that suited me perfectly so I said let's do it and I wrote a letter at his request to the original Parish that had my baptism this is the letter I wrote them and I actually posted it by registered mail so I could make sure that they signed for it and it actually got through it says to the arch dasis blah blah blah in L of of formal excommunication from the Catholic church I wish to have my baptism annotated appropriately to indicate that I Dylan Thomas O'Donnell am not a member of the Catholic church in any capacity I do not wish to be included in any statistics that may include my baptism as a record of Catholic adherence nor do I wish to receive or be allowed any of the Privileges from the Catholic church that any other members may be entitled to now this means that I can't go to a um well I can't have an officiated Catholic wedding or funeral or any of that maybe my kids can't go to Catholic School don't care for all intents and purposes seeing as my baptism occurred during childhood before anyone could reasonably consider my participation in such as a choice I consider my baptism anull I've discussed this issue with the local Lismore New South Wales Bishop Jeffrey Jarrett who's very gracious and thoughtful on the matter and who explained to me that excommunication would not be appropriate as I haven't actually done anything to agree with the church save for leaving it please confirm receed of this letter and confirmation of my baptisms annotation at your early at your earliest conveni your sincerely Dylan Thomas O'Donnell now after I sent this letter after I saw that they had signed for it there was radio silence actually radios aren't really that silent it was more like just silence maybe crickets so I emailed the good Bishop Jeffrey Jarrett and I asked what's going on haven't heard from you in a while is my baptism in Al or what and eventually he wrote back and the subject of the email oh where is it the subject of the email was no longer a member of the Catholic church and it starts dear Dylan I am sorry that I have not checked up early on the progress of your request having been away on business in Rome late last year followed by a summer break and even a holiday as I was personally responding to the matter it was not a task I could leave with my office now what was the good Bishop doing in Rome that sounds pretty uh serious if you have to go visit the boss surely it was nothing to do with me uh no I googled this and it turns out he was involved in a Royal commission or a big public inquiry because the pope had told him to cover up some pretty nasty business and I can't say it on YouTube in case this video gets flagged but it involves children and it involves covering up and you get the idea he was told by the pope to put this stuff in a drawer and forget about it uh pretty nasty so anyway once he got back from De that's just a tangent to this crazy story I'm still trying to get unbaptized here and I quote Dylan Thomas O'Donald no longer regards himself as a member of the Catholic Church from the 7th of June 2013 he notified to Lismore Bishop Lismore Bishop notified to the Parish of East Victoria Park wa please see correspondence in the confidential file in the parish the letters are kept in the confidential file in the parish archives hopefully a separate filing cabinet to the other nasty one he was just involved in blah blah blah and then there's a whole bit of text about him very being very gracious and saying you know you can come back to the Catholic church if you change your mind later on but that was the end end of it I am no longer baptized and I can't use the Catholic church for anything in the sense that the Catholic Church provides funerals and weddings and stuff like that now the most common question I get when I tell people this story is why why do you care and I have to go back to that point about statistics if you've been baptized and you haven't told them that you're not a Catholic anymore they still think you're a Catholic you are still in the database all of this shows me they do have dat bases and they have registers and all of those baptisms are filed having the baptism certificate helped me in order to chase down that record but if you can ask your parents where you were baptized CU presumably they did it for you not you uh once you know the parish you were baptized in you can go back ask them to annotate that record maybe they might make you jump through this process of talking to a bishop as well I don't know now the other question people commonly ask me when I tell them this story is what did the church do to you Dylan is there something going on did something happen in that room when you were an alter boy no I can happily say nothing like that ever happened to me but I think that question is super dark and really says more about the Catholic Church than it does about my un baptism that is horrible and the other reason I did it is maybe because it was kind of funny I've been unbaptized now for 10 years and uh they've been great nothing's changed I still listen to Slayer and the other common response to my apostasy in in General on this channel because as you know the sign off on this channel is remember everything is meaningless and we're all going to die and remember everything is meaningless and we're all going to die and remember everything is meaningless and we're all going to die and that tends to really rile some people up and they feel like uh saving me in the comments they really um feel it's their duty to convert me or somehow get me back into the flock and I have to remind them that that is actually a quote from the Bible it's like the whole treaties behind the Ecclesiastes chapter which is a fantastic chapter about how uh all of this is temporary life is temporary and precious and you shouldn't squander it but there is no greater meaning to it you just need to enjoy it you may have also noticed that my middle name is Thomas uh that's because I was named partly after the alcoholic poet which is appropriate but it's also Catholic tradition to give your children a Biblical middle name and my middle name comes straight out of the Bible and I think that's also very appropriate cuz I'm named after the one disciple the one guy who when Jesus rose from the dead Thomas is the only guy who said you know what I think this is and remember everything is meaningless and we're all going to die [Music] he

Channel: Dylan O'Donnell

Views: 7,886

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Id: bkUcJK3u3UQ

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 21 2024