Self-Inflicted Shrinkage: Church Runs Away Record Number of Believers

One abuse scandal follows the next in the Catholic Church. This leads to mass withdrawals from the church. As early as 2021, more Catholics than ever before are turning their backs on the institution. Figures from larger cities now suggest that 2022 will probably be even more disastrous.

Since the beginning of the year, significantly more people have apparently left the church than in previous years. This is the result of a dpa survey of larger cities in Germany. Tens of thousands turned their backs on the church. The city of Munich alone recorded a total of 26,008 people leaving the church by December 15, 2022, according to a spokesman for the district administrative council. That’s almost 4,000 more than in the entire previous year. The respective denomination was not recorded.

According to a spokeswoman for the Berlin civil courts, 18,018 people left the church in Berlin in the first three quarters of this year – also around 4,000 more than in 2021 in the same period. Of these, 9,466 were Protestant and 8,442 Roman Catholic, the rest had another denomination. The Lower Saxony state capital of Hanover reported a similar trend: by mid-December 2022, a total of more than 7,000 people had left the church, almost 4,700 from the Evangelical Lutheran Church and almost 2,300 from the Catholic Church. In the whole of 2021, around 6,600 people left the church in Hanover.

In the Hessian state capital of Wiesbaden, the number of people leaving the church also increased significantly in 2022. According to the city, well over 3,200 exits were registered in Wiesbaden and the suburbs by autumn of the current year. There were 3095 in the whole of 2021. Cities in Baden-Württemberg and Saxony reported very similar developments. In Mainz, the number of people who left the Catholic or Protestant Church this year also increased significantly. By the end of November, 3,495 members had turned their backs on the two major churches, as the city announced on request. This is an increase of 36.7 percent compared to the full year 2021.

At least in the case of the Bavarian state capital, one reason for the increase is the report on cases of abuse in the Catholic archdiocese of Munich and Freising, which was presented at the end of January and made headlines around the world. Because especially at the beginning of the year, the numbers had skyrocketed. In the first half of January, i.e. before the report, around 80 people had left the church every working day in Munich. After January 20, the day the report was presented, there were sometimes up to 160 people leaving the church – about twice as many.

On January 20, the law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl (WSW) presented an expert opinion on behalf of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising. The experts assume at least 497 victims and 235 alleged perpetrators, but at the same time from a significantly higher number of unreported cases – and from the fact that Munich archbishops – including Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI. – had behaved incorrectly in dealing with it.

The second largest Bavarian city of Nuremberg counted 6,628 church exits by mid-December compared to 4,544 in the same period of 2021. Of these, 2,434 were Roman Catholic and 2,057 were Protestant. This threatens to set a new negative record. In 2021, 359,338 Catholics had already turned their backs on their church – more than ever before. “This trend will probably be difficult to stop or even reverse,” said Christian Weisner of the “We Are Church” reform movement. He sees a direct connection to what he sees as the inadequate processing of cases of abuse in the church – “because it took far too long for the bishops in Germany and the two predecessor popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, to recognize their responsibility”.

And the trend is obviously not just an urban phenomenon: the same trend can also be seen in Burghausen in Upper Bavaria, to which Ratzinger’s birthplace, Marktl am Inn, belongs. A total of 438 people left the church there in 2022, 371 of them Roman Catholic and 67 Protestant. In 2021 there were still 314 resignations, of which 266 were Roman Catholic church members and 48 were Protestant. In the Upper Bavarian pilgrimage town of Altötting, 446 people declared their withdrawal from the church by December 15 – compared to 288 in total in 2021. 388 of them were Roman Catholic, 55 were Protestants.

The religious educator Ulrich Riegel, who conducted a widely acclaimed study on church exits in the diocese of Essen, was already counting on a new exit record this year at the end of February. As a social factor, the church is becoming “smaller and more humble,” said the chairman of the Catholic German Bishops’ Conference, Georg Bätzing, to “Focus” last week. She is stuck in a “deep credibility crisis”, which she has largely caused herself – for example through scandals in connection with the abuse of children and young people. A study by the Bertelsmann Foundation had previously shown that, according to the survey, many other people were toying with the idea of ??turning their backs on the institution.