German Exodus: Half a Million Catholics Abandon Church in Historic Departure

National Catholic Register ^ | June 28, 2023 | AC Wimmer

[ebb tide]

German Exodus: Half a Million Catholics Abandon Church in Historic Departure

The Catholic Church in Germany is facing an unprecedented crisis, with more than half a million baptized Catholics leaving the Church in 2022, according to figures released by the German Bishops’ Conference on June 28. 

This marks the highest number of departures ever recorded, with 522,821 people choosing to leave the Church, according to CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language partner news agency.

The total number of departures, including deaths, exceeded 708,000, a stark contrast to the 155,173 baptisms and 1,447 new members recorded during the same period. The figures reveal a historic negative trend, with the number of departures doubling from over 270,000 in 2020 to the current record.

Despite these departures, Church statistics for 2022 show that nearly 21 million people in Germany remained officially Catholic by the end of the year, representing 24.8% of the country’s resident population of 84.4 million.

Several German bishops expressed dismay over the figures. Bishop Stefan Oster of Passau described the numbers as “frighteningly high,” while Bishop Bertram Meier of Augsburg acknowledged the Church’s need to regain trust with “patience and credibility.”

[irishjuggler]

It takes a special sort of Teutonic arrogance to propose that the solution to your problems is to triple down on the liberal apostasy that’s driven people away in the first place, but there they go.

You know, I actually like many things about Germany, the cars, the beer, the glockenspiels, the pretty girls in dirndls, but there’s a strain of very destructive, poisonous arrogance that has permeated their culture for centuries. Going back to Luther and Nietzche and Hitler, these twin attitudes of “we know better than the rest of the world” and “we are better than the rest of the world” manifest themselves over and over within that society.

[MurphsLaw]

This.
The German Church has been leaning liberal for decades.
AND many Germans still look down upon very Catholic Poland
with neighborly disgust.

Interestingly I am told,
for Poles who often emigrate elsewhere,
see Germans at the top of their list for incoming immigrants...fwiw

[If You Want It Fixed - Fix It]

See y’all in hell.