The number of people leaving the Catholic Church is higher than ever. Last year it was 359,338 people, as announced by the German Bishops’ Conference. In 2020, a good 220,000 people left the church, compared to almost 273,000 the year before. There are now just under 22 million Catholics in Germany.
2021 was a particularly critical year for the Catholic Church. Among other things, it was marked by the deep crisis of confidence in the Archdiocese of Cologne over an abuse report that Archbishop Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki had initially withheld. There, the number of resignations has more than doubled. Across Germany, the increase is 62 percent.
The chairman of the bishops’ conference, Georg Bätzing, said the figures show “the profound crisis in which we find ourselves as the Catholic Church in Germany”. He was shocked by the extremely high number of people leaving the church. “And to these numbers we have to add the realization that not only are people leaving who have had little or no contact with their parish for a long period of time, but there is increasing feedback that people are taking this step who have previously been in were very committed to the parishes.”
The corona pandemic also had an impact on church life in 2021: the number of churchgoers fell, but at the same time more weddings and baptisms were celebrated – many were probably made up for in the first corona year, 2020. The number of parishes in Germany has continued to decrease, as has the number of priests.
In Bavaria, the numbers are rising drastically again this year
This year, the number of people leaving the church could increase even further in some places. Because at the end of January, the report on abuse in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising was presented. It assumes at least 497 victims and 235 alleged perpetrators, but at the same time from a significantly higher number of unreported cases – and raised serious allegations against several leading representatives of the church, including the former Archbishop of Munich Joseph Ratzinger, the emeritus Pope Benedict XVI.
Since then, several large Bavarian cities have registered a sharp increase in the number of exits, as the German Press Agency has researched. There are “more people leaving the church than ever before,” said the spokesman for the district administration department in Munich. Between January 1 and June 22 of this year, 14,035 people left the church in Munich – across all denominations. In the same period of 2021, there were a good 10,000 and in 2019, at a good 7,500, it was significantly less. Mayer called the number 5538 from the first six months in the first Corona year 2020 difficult to compare because of the lockdown.
In Regensburg, the city where Ratzinger lived and taught, the number of resignations rose to 2073 – compared to 1239 in the same period last year. In Augsburg there were 2068 exits compared to 1406 in the same period of 2021, Ingolstadt counted 1260 exits (comparable period 2021: 699). The figures published by the bishops’ conference on Monday do not reflect the effects of the abuse report, they only refer to the year 2021.
The Evangelical Church had already published its statistics in March. Accordingly, 280,000 people left it last year. At the end of 2021, fewer than 20 million people were members of one of the 20 member churches in Germany for the first time.