The number of Germans leaving the Catholic church as much as
tripled in October. Trust among followers has plummeted after a major
financial scandal, experts said on Thursday.
There has been a significant increase in people filling out
paperwork at town halls to leave both the Catholic and Evangelical
churches between September and October, new research suggested on
Thursday.
The trend is, experts said, linked to the “bling
Bishop” scandal, in which Catholic Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst
was found to have spent millions of euros of church money on his own
private house – including hundreds of thousands on cupboards alone.
Church officials are calling it the “Tebartz-effect”, with dioceses
across the country reporting receiving letters from congregation members
saying that they had lost faith in the church's handling of its
finances. When a person leaves the church, they become exempt from
church tax which is levied by the government.
A full, 65
percent of German Catholics consider their church less, or not at all,
trustworthy, according to pollsters Forsa who recently conducted a
survey.
In Cologne, 571 people officially left the Catholic
church in October – twice the number who left in September. This was,
city council spokesman Marcus Strunk said, the highest number in years.
Cologne's Evangelical church also saw an 80 percent rise in people
leaving its pews in the same time frame – with 228 people unregistering.
“People are queueing morning and evening,” at the council offices, said
Strunk.
In Paderborn, also in North Rhine-Westphalia, the
number of Catholics unregistering tripled on the month before. Osnabrück
and Bremen also reported rising figures. As did councils across
Bavaria, a largely Catholic state.
Bavariacapital Munich saw
1,250 people leave the Catholic church in October, more than twice the
602 who left in September. In Regensburg, Nuremberg and Passau the
number tripled.
Religion sociologist Detlef Pollack from
Münster University said this sudden jump was part of a trend that had
been developing slowly for some time.
“The quality of living
and level of education is so high [in Germany] that fewer people are
turning to the spiritual support and social services of the church,” he
said.