Record number of German Catholics leave church – DW – 06/26/2020 (2024)
Germany's top Catholic body said Friday that a record 272,771 people left the country's Catholic Church in 2019, and that the number of baptisms and weddings taking place in churches also dropped sharply.
The chairman of the German Bishops' Conference, Georg Bätzing, said the statistics could not be made to look good in any way and that the drop in baptism and wedding ceremonies showed the "erosion of a personal attachment to the church" particularly clearly.
The German Protestant Church (EKD) also had cause to be concerned about its membership numbers, with 270,000 people leaving in 2019, an increase of 22% on the year before. The figure equals that of 2014.
EKD head Heinrich Bedford-Strohm said that every person lost to the church was a painful blow, as church workers were all "highly motivated."
Churches in Germany also suffer financially when they lose members, as a church tax is deducted from people's incomes if they are registered as being either Catholic or Protestant.
No reason for leaving a church has to be given. Bedford-Strohm said the reasons for the increase in departures would be examined in a special study. Last year, both churches published a study in which they predicted that membership numbers would be halved by 2060.
With deaths outnumbering births in recent years, the fall in membership goes beyond the number of people leaving. There are now around 22.6 million Catholics in Germany, a drop of 400,000 in 2019, and 20.7 million Protestants, 427,000 fewer than the year before.
Altogether 52.1% of people in Germany still officially belong to one of the two main Christian denominations.
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Since victims of the clergy's sexual abuse made the crimes public in 2010, and more reports of crimes and cover-ups and systemic failures followed, the number of people leaving the church has been rising constantly.
As of 2023, one in two Germans no longer belonged to either of the major Christian churches. Church buildings are, therefore, being demolished. Sometimes, they are successfully taken over by other denominations, for example, by Orthodox Christian communities.
These departures go hand in hand with a significant decline in church attendance over several decades. In 2021, throughout Germany, the Sunday worship attendance rate was 4.3% for Catholics and around 3% for Protestants.
Taxpayers, whether Catholic, Protestant or members of other tax-collecting communities, pay an amount equal to 8% in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, and 9% in the rest of the country, of their income tax to the church or religious community to which they belong.
According to these church stats, Christianity is the largest religious group in Germany, with around 44.9 million adherents (52.7%) in 2021 of whom 21.6 million are Catholics (26.0%) and 19.7 million are Protestants (23.7%).
The German Catholics (German: Deutschkatholiken) were formed in December 1844 by German dissidents from the Roman Catholic Church, under the leadership of Johannes Ronge.
A little over 60 percent of Germans identify as Christians, with the two main Christian churches, the Catholics (die Katholiken) and the Protestants (mostly Lutherans, die Evangelischen), at about 30 percent each. However, certain geographic areas of Germany tend to have more Catholics or Protestants.
About 60% of Germany is Christian, 30% is Agnostic or Atheist and there is a fair amount of Muslims, with about 5% of Germans being Muslims. Of the Christians, about half are Catholic while the other half is Protestant. Originally Answered: What is the major religion in Germany?
As of 2021, approximately 42% of Germans are irreligious, with a much higher concentration of irreligious citizens in the former East Germany. Eastern Germany, which was historically Protestant, is by far the least religious region in the world.
Lutherans and Roman Catholics in Germany now are about equal in number. Small percentages of Germans belong to what are known as the free churches, such as Evangelical Methodists, Calvinists, Old Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, and (by far the largest) Eastern Orthodox.
In 2022, it was estimated that 50.7% of the German population were Christians, among them, 47.4% members of the two large Christian churches. Attendance and membership in both Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany have been declining for several decades.
Warfare intensified after the Catholic Church began the Counter-Reformation against the growth of Protestantism in 1545. The conflicts culminated in the Thirty Years' War, which devastated Germany and killed one third of its population, a mortality rate twice that of World War I.
Around half of Germany's Christians are from the Evangelical Church of Germany (a combination of Protestant religions including Lutheranism and Protestant Calvinism) and half are Roman Catholic.
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