The churches are empty...
There is an undeniable emptiness within the psyche of those who have left the Church yet find compelled to spend countless hours each day rationalizing and defending their choice to leave to anyone, Catholic or non-Catholic, who will listen. I hope some day you find something to fill that void.
The Catholic Churches may be empty in Germany, but they aren’t here. Our parish church is jammed every Sunday at the 8, 9:30, 11:15, and 1:30 masses, as well as the two Saturday masses and the two weekday masses. I can hardly find a place to stand on Sunday mornings. When I joined the Church a year and a half ago, I went with my fellow converts to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, and was astonished at the thousands of people from all over the DC area who were flooding in as new Catholics. They couldn’t all fit into that enormous cathedral at one time and had to be taken in two separate sessions. There are hundreds of thousands of new American Catholic converts each year, many coming in from the mainstream Protestant faiths, like the Episcopal Church.