The Deacon's Bench
The numbers are grim, but sadly unsurprising, given the bad news out of the German church last year.
The number of people leaving the Roman Catholic Church in Germany jumped by nearly 50 percent in 2010 as an abuse scandal widened, new data showed Friday.
Some 181,000 people quit their memberships last year, up from 124,000 in 2009, official numbers released by Germany’s Roman Catholic Church showed.
Deaths and people turning away from the church heavily outnumbered baptisms, which reached a record low, putting one of the world’s wealthiest and most influential Catholic Churches further in decline.
Over the past twenty years, the number of members of Germany’s Roman Catholic Church has fallen from 28.3 million to 24.6 million or 30.2 percent of the country’s population in 2010, the data showed.
The numbers are easily tracked because members pay a church tax unless they formally leave the congregation — the same reason the declining membership has led to increasing budget shortfalls for the church.
The new figures come ahead of a planned visit by Bavarian-born Pope Benedict XVI on Sept 22-25, when he is scheduled to visit the cities of Freiburg, Erfurt and Berlin where he will deliver a speech to German parliament.
Germans are not required to say why they want to strike their church membership, but many have blamed the reports of sexual and physical abuse of hundreds of children by clergy that surfaced last year.
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