Germany: Catholic Church loses half a million members
A record number of people left the German Catholic Church in 2022, the German Bishops' Conference (DBK) said on Wednesday.
A total of 522,821 people ended their official relationship with the church, surpassing the record broken in the previous year when 359,338 people left.
The departures follow a series of child abuse scandals that have rocked the church in Germany, and elsewhere.
Even though more and more people are leaving the church, there are still 20.94 million people — just under a quarter of Germany's population — who are registered members of the church.
"The Catholic Church is dying an agonizing death before the eyes of the public," Thomas Schüller, an expert in Catholic canonic law at the University of Münster and close observer of the German Catholic Church, told German news agency DPA.
It's not only the Catholic Church that is suffering. Mainstream protestant churches have also seen their registered number of followers fall. In 2022, some 380,000 left Germany's Evangelical Church.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-record-num...a-66058149
A record number of people left the German Catholic Church in 2022, the German Bishops' Conference (DBK) said on Wednesday.
A total of 522,821 people ended their official relationship with the church, surpassing the record broken in the previous year when 359,338 people left.
The departures follow a series of child abuse scandals that have rocked the church in Germany, and elsewhere.
Even though more and more people are leaving the church, there are still 20.94 million people — just under a quarter of Germany's population — who are registered members of the church.
"The Catholic Church is dying an agonizing death before the eyes of the public," Thomas Schüller, an expert in Catholic canonic law at the University of Münster and close observer of the German Catholic Church, told German news agency DPA.
It's not only the Catholic Church that is suffering. Mainstream protestant churches have also seen their registered number of followers fall. In 2022, some 380,000 left Germany's Evangelical Church.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-record-num...a-66058149
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"