Christians fed up with the Church in Europe aren’t just leaving their congregations, they’re taking steps to become officially “de-baptized,” and they’re doing so in numbers that are beginning to worry Church leaders.

Elizabeth Bryant of the Religion News Service (RNS) is reporting that a combination of the clergy abuse scandals and Pope Benedict XVI’s stance on social issues is causing some Catholics to take radical steps to disassociate themselves from the Church.

For instance, 71 year-old Rene Lebouvier went to court to force his parish church to permanently delete his name from their records, making him the first Frenchman to be officially “de-baptized.”

“I took the judicial route to get myself de-baptized because of the church’s excesses,” said Lebouvier, from the village of Fleury, near the D-Day beaches.

“It’s a sort of honesty toward the church because they have a guy on their register who doesn’t believe in God.”

Lebouvier’s case is one of a growing number of de-baptisms in Europe, and Websites offering informal de-baptism certificates have been slowly mushrooming across the continent.

“The movement is happening across Europe,” said Anne Morelli, who heads a center studying religion and secularity at the Free University of Brussels. “It was very apparent during 2011 — in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Austria. It is obviously related to the scandals of pedophile priests, but it has been going on for some time.”

Although there are no official statistics, experts and secular activists (who may be inclined to inflate the numbers) say the number of de-baptisms is in the tens of thousands and it’s a phenomenon that it touching both Catholic and Protestant communities.

The worry is that cases like Lebouvier’s may create a precedent that too many others may choose to follow.

This is why the local bishop of Coutances, Stanislas Lalanne, has appealed the court ruling, a process that could take years.

“Baptism is a spiritual gift, it’s bigger than we are,” said Bernard Podvin, spokesman for the French Bishops Confederation, who would not comment on the specifics of the Normandy case. “It can’t be confined to a purely administrative framework.”

But if Lebouvier wins, de-baptism could become standard practice here, and trigger copycat lawsuits across Europe, Bryant reports.

“The church is afraid the movement might amplify,” said Marc Blondel, president of the Paris-based National Federation of Freethinkers, who intends to launch another de-baptism campaign if Lebouvier prevails.

Unfortunately, France isn’t the only country effected by this drive to exit the Church.

As Bryant reports, in neighboring Belgium, which was hit hard by the church sex scandals, de-baptism requests in the French-speaking region alone soared to roughly 2,000 in 2010, compared to only 66 two years earlier. The numbers of people reportedly leaving the Dutch church reportedly shot up 25 percent.

In Britain, a de-baptism certificate offered as a joke by the National Secular Society has since turned serious after tens of thousands of people downloaded it.

“Some people actually do feel actively hostile toward churches,” said society president Terry Sanderson. “And they want to express that by saying, ‘I’m not one of your members.'”

In Germany, an unprecedented 181,000 Catholics formally split from the Catholic Church in 2011, marking the first time that Catholic defections outpaced those of Protestant denominations. But instead of requesting de-baptism, Germans simply fill out government paperwork saying they no longer want to pay church taxes.

“I don’t think they want to get rid of their belief, their connection to Jesus and the baptism, but they don’t want to be connected with the church hierarchy,” said Christian Weisner, German spokesman for the international lay reform movement We are Church.

An even bigger worry for the Church in these countries is the plummeting rate of new baptisms. For example, 50 years ago, 90 percent of French children were baptized, said Sorbonne University religion professor Philippe Portier. Today, roughly one in three receive the sacrament.

“The church considers de-baptisms a very marginal phenomena and its strategy right now is to resist it,” Portier told RNS. “It is much more active when it comes to reversing the drop in (new) baptisms — there it’s put in place a new evangelizing strategy.”

This new evangelization is paying off in some places. Bryant discovered one parish in Paris’ historic Saint-Germain-des-Pres which offers a myriad of activities, from ski retreats to support networks for young professionals. At a recent evening youth Mass, the church was overflowing.

The parish priest, the Rev. Benoist de Sinety, said he’s counting on faith, not numbers.

“What is striking today is that those who want to be Christian really want to be Christian,” he said. “I rejoice in the fact that people are free to choose.”

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