Friday, April 15, 2011

‘180,000 Catholics quit church last year in Germany’

AS many as 180,000 Catholics quit the church last year in the wake of persistent child sex abuse scandals, a media report said recently.

What it means is that more Catholics abandoned their church than Protestants for the first time in Germany.

According to a survey by magazine Christ & Welt, 180,000 Catholics left the church in 2010, which was a rise of 40 percent on the previous year.

Compared with this, 150,000 left the country’s Protestant Church, the survey said.

In the Catholic community, membership decline was concentrated in the first half of the year around the time when public anger over child abuse scandals was at its peak.

Responding to the survey, Cologne vicar-general Dominik Schwaderlapp said that many Catholics had left as a ‘personal form of protest and expression of disgust.’

The magazine surveyed 27 Catholic dioceses, 24 of which provided definite figures.

Over 200 cases of child abuse at church institutions throughout the country emerged in the months that followed, the report added.