In the Archdiocese of Cologne, in view of the disastrous handling of the coming to terms with sexual abuse by Archbishop Rainer Maria Cardinal Woelki, more Catholics than ever before left the church.

The exit numbers, which the Cologne District Court published on Monday, as well as inquiries from the FAZ to other district courts in the Archdiocese speak for this.

According to the Cologne District Court, the number of people leaving has almost doubled compared to the previous high of 2019.

According to this, 19,340 withdrawals were recorded in Cologne in 2021, compared to 10 073 two years earlier. In 2020, as everywhere in Germany, the number was still declining due to the pandemic-related restrictions.

Thomas Jansen

Editor in politics.

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The Cologne District Court does not break down its statistics by denomination; but it is safe to say that the sharp increase is largely due to the Catholics. Such a “Woelki effect” is also suggested by the figures from five other cities in the archbishopric, for which the FAZ has data broken down by denomination. In Bonn, for example, the district court more than doubled the number of resignations compared to the record year 2019; from 1997 Catholics to 4116. The number of Protestants who left rose by around fifty percent.

In Düsseldorf, the second largest city in the archbishopric, the number of people leaving has increased by more than thirty percent.

As the local court announced, 3963 Catholics left the church in 2021, compared to 2826 in 2019. In Wuppertal and Leverkusen the increase was more than fifty percent compared to 2019;

only in Solingen did the number of people leaving remained more or less constant at the high level of 2019.

The massive turning away of Catholics from their church in the Archdiocese of Cologne is evidently by no means just a big-city phenomenon.

In the district of the Siegburg District Court near Bonn, for example, which includes rural communities such as Ruppichteroth and Neunkirchen-Seelscheid, the number of people leaving the church increased by about half compared to 2019.

The Archdiocese of Cologne sees no reason to comment on the exit figures.

At the request of the FAZ, the archbishopric announced on Tuesday that the figures for 2021 “will probably be published by all dioceses and regional churches at the same time in the summer”.

The chairman of the diocesan council in the Archdiocese of Cologne, the Lord Mayor of Solingen, Tim Kurzbach, was shocked that the number of people leaving the church in the city of Cologne has almost doubled.

Many long-term committed people turned their backs on the church, said the SPD politician on the bishopric's own internet portal domradio.de.

"There is a blaze of fire under our church roof in the Archdiocese of Cologne".