The number of people leaving the Catholic Church has increased dramatically and has reached a new record level.

As the German Bishops' Conference announced on Monday, a total of around 360,000 Catholics left the church in 2021.

This is an increase of more than thirty percent compared to the previous record year of 2019, when almost 273,000 people turned their backs on the Catholic Church.

In 2020, the number of people leaving the church had fallen to around 221,000 due to the corona virus, because the district courts and registry offices that accept the declaration of resignation were only open to a limited extent.

Thomas Jansen

Editor in Politics.

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The chairman of the German Bishops' Conference, Georg Bätzing, said he was "deeply shocked by the extremely high number of people leaving the church".

The figures show the "profound crisis" in which the Catholic Church in Germany finds itself.

"There is nothing nice to talk about," Bätzing is quoted as saying in the press release from the bishops' conference.

In the meantime, not only those people who have had little or no contact with their parish for a long time are leaving, said Bätzing.

There was increasing feedback that people who had previously been very involved in the parishes were taking this step.

The departure that the church is taking with the "Synodal Way" reform project has "apparently not yet arrived here in contact with believers".

In the past twenty years, the annual number of people leaving the church has tripled.

In 2002, only around 120,000 Catholics had left the church.

In 2006, the number of resignations reached a temporary low of 86,000.

Since then, it has risen sharply in three big waves in 2010, 2014 and 2019 and has fallen again in the following years, but has remained at a high level.

The year 2010 marks the beginning of the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in Germany.

In January of the same year, the Jesuit Father Klaus Mertes publicized the sexual abuse at the Canisius College in Berlin, causing a domino effect.

Four years later, it was above all a new collection procedure for church tax on capital gains that caused church withdrawals to skyrocket.

Originally, the church tax was only paid at the request of the taxpayer together with the final withholding tax, from January 1, 2015 this was done automatically.

This caused great resentment, because many people got the impression that it was an additional tax.

Added to this was the scandal surrounding the Limburg Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst.

The third peak in the statistics of church exits since 2002 is the year 2019. In September 2018 the abuse study of the German Bishops' Conference was published, which comprehensively documented the mass abuse of minors and their systematic cover-up for the first time.

According to many studies, there is no single reason for leaving the Catholic Church, in most cases there are several reasons.

A study presented in March by the Social Science Institute of the Evangelical Church in Germany came to the conclusion that the reasons associated with a failure of the church play a greater role for Catholics than for Protestants.

Accordingly, 79 percent of the questioned ex-Catholics called the lack of equal rights for women as a reason for their decision.

85 percent of Catholics who have left the church since 2018 also agreed with the statement: "I left the church because I find the church unbelievable".

Among the Protestants who left, it was 69 percent of the Protestants.

Significantly more Catholics than Protestants also state that “the church does not live what Jesus actually wanted” or that they have “different values” than those represented by the church as a reason for leaving.

According to the study, only 37 percent of Catholics had a specific reason for leaving, compared to only 24 percent of Protestants.

The abuse scandal (79 percent) and the "waste of financial resources" (61 percent) are at the forefront and were mentioned much more frequently than by Protestants.

Another reason is the way their church treats homosexuals.

According to the study, however, there is also a sizeable minority of Catholics, at almost thirty percent, who state that one reason for leaving is that the church is too ingratiating with the spirit of the times; among Protestants, the figure is well over thirty percent.

However, the study also shows that the current social form of the Catholic Church is not the only reason for the wave of withdrawals;

it is scarcely less affected by the growing secularization of society than is the evangelical one.

Around half of those who left both denominations stated that they were indifferent to the church.

Just over fifty percent of all respondents claimed that they did not need any religion in their lives, and just as many can no longer do anything with faith.