False
Churches, False Brethren, False Gospels
200,000 Germans quit Catholic church after 2010 sex scandal
By JUERGEN BAETZ, Associated Press
BERLIN — 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 200,000 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.
The diocese that recorded the highest member loss last year was
Munich and Freising — the pope's former diocese, which had been
hard-hit by the abuse scandal — where 21,600 people alone left the
church.
The Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Cardinal Reinhard Marx,
late last year begged forgiveness for "everything those working
for the church have done" as he presented a report that showed
more-than 250 priests and religion teachers sexually or physically
abused children in the diocese over the past decades.
"We want to learn from our bad mistakes and misconduct of the
past," Marx then vowed.
In its response to the abuse scandal, Germany's Bishops Conference
has publicly and repeatedly showed remorse, changed the relevant
guidelines for the clergy and offered up to €5,000 ($6,900)
compensation to victims of abuse by clergy or church officials
while they were minors, but it gave no total number of victims.
The overall number of German faithful in 2010 fell by a total of
258,000 as deaths and people turning away from the church heavily
outnumbered baptisms, which reached a record low of 170,000.
Austria, which taxes church members in a way similar to those in
Germany also saw a significant drop in the number of departures.
Figures published by the Austrian Bishop's Conference earlier this
year said 87,000 Austrian Catholics left in 2010, a 64 percent
increase over the 53,000 who formally had their names struck from
church registries in 2009.
___
Melissa Eddy in Berlin contributed to this report.