The number of people leaving the church has never been so high
The Catholic Church records a new negative record of withdrawals.
This is evidence of a “profound crisis,” said the head of the bishops’ conference.
In the past year, more people have left the Catholic Church than ever before. 359,338 Catholics turned their backs on their church in 2021 alone, as the German Bishops’ Conference (DBK) announced on Monday in Bonn. This is a new negative record. “For us, this is the highest number so far,” said DBK spokesman Matthias Kopp. The Catholic Church still had 21,645,875 members – that is 26 percent of the total population.
DBK chairman Georg Bätzing was “deeply shocked by the extremely high number of people leaving the church”. The number is evidence of a “profound crisis in which we as the Catholic Church in Germany are,” he said. “There’s nothing nice about it.”
In 2020, with 221,390 people, significantly fewer Catholics had left the church, in 2019 – the year before Corona – the number was 272,771 according to DBK information.
