When it comes to the Catholic Church in Germany, right now the headlines are focusing on chilling abuse scandals.
Two landmark trials, for example, have begun at Cologne District Court, with victims of sexual abuse demanding nearly €1.7 million in damages from the Catholic Church.
One woman, reportedly raped repeatedly by her priest, who then forced her to have an abortion, is claiming €850,000.
Another woman, allegedly abused around 200 times from age six by her altar group leader, is demanding €800,000.
And instead of directly targeting the perpetrators, both cases are targeting the Cologne Archdiocese for institutional failure.
The victims’ rage is wholly justified, as is any outrage at the chilling arrogance that the Church has shown over the years, with its blatant disregard for transparency and accountability on this issue .
But devastating as these scandals are, and should be, for the Catholic Church in Germany, I think it faces a quieter, but arguably far bigger danger, if you stop and take stock of everything else that is going on in Germany.
Last week, the German Bishops’ Conference and dioceses of the Catholic Church published their 2024 figures, all of which paint an extremely glum picture.
The administration of the sacraments declined significantly between 2023 and 2024, with 15,000 fewer baptisms, 5,000 fewer weddings and just 6.6 per cent of Catholics attending Holy Mass in Germany. The number of priestly ordinations was a paltry 29.
But the bad news doesn’t end there, as figures reveal that in 2024 more than 322,000 Catholics in the Federal Republic officially also ceased to be members of the Church.
As well as being a gut punch to its public image, on a financial level this will also hit the German Catholic Church hard, as it means a sudden drop in the amount of people paying Kirchensteuer – the church tax.
As in neighbouring Austria or Switzerland, those who officially leave the Church can stop paying the otherwise obligatory church tax that comes out of their salaries.
And this is really serious stuff, as the money accounts for over 70 per cent of Church revenue in most dioceses, making it overwhelmingly their largest and most distinctive source of income to their services, staff and welfare programmes.
With fewer funds, the Church will therefore be forced to downsize in all of these areas, resulting in a further reduction of its influence.
But another problem for the German Catholic Church is the Synodal Path – Germany’s big, bold reform project.
Earlier this year, German bishops proposed creating a permanent “national synodal council” to explore a range of tough questions.
These include everything from whether women should be ordained to whether celibacy should be required, along with whether same-sex couples should be blessed and whether the Church’s power should be shared with the laity.
The Vatican’s response has been thinly veiled panic at this supposed heresy in slow motion amongst the German Catholic Church.
Meanwhile, at ground level, ordinary German Catholics are now totally caught between competing visions of the Church.
One is still clinging to clerical control and doctrinal purity, but the other progressive camp is demanding the Catholic Church gets with the times and makes peace with modern life.
Almost 28 per cent of senior roles in German dioceses are now held by women. And in some dioceses, women are even sharing executive power with bishops.
While the issue of female ordination is firmly off the table, for now, it links to another elephant that is still definitely in the room.
For many young Catholics who’ve grown up in a world of gender equality and LGBTQ+ inclusion policies, not allowing the possibility of female priests seems a failure to embrace the world we are living in.
This February, for example, Germany marked three years since the launch of #OutInChurch – a movement of queer Catholic employees publicly coming out and demanding change. Some German dioceses have started blessing same-sex couples.
Another colossal headache for the Catholic Church in Germany is Kirchliches Arbeitsrecht (ecclesiastical employment law) – a uniquely German headache, which basically allows German churches to bypass the country’s standard and strict labour laws.
Specifically, it means the Church can deny workers the right to strike, and means it can dismiss staff for personal choices like divorce or being in a same-sex relationship, and also limit union rights.
Whereas discrimination law would make such moves totally illegal for most employers in Germany today, it has meant that the German Church has long been able to protect its extremely wide network of institutions (schools, hospitals, charities and so forth) from scrutiny, as they operate outside usual labour laws.
Right now this is being fiercely opposed by the centrist Social Democratic Party (SDP), while the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) demand that it should be kept; this is one of several issues which is currently preventing the ideologically opposed parties from forming a working coalition government.
More complicated still is that Martin Nebeling, head of the Catholic Employers’ Association, made the shock move recently of not just defending Germany’s special Church employment law, but even launched an attack on modern Germany’s standard labour laws.
Specifically, he attacked the 11-hour rest rule between workdays: he slammed it as “outdated” and bad for business, claiming instead that the rest of Germany should implement flexible working schedules.
In Germany, labour law protections are extremely strong. Dismissals are highly regulated – and after six months, workers gain protection against unfair dismissal, and employers must even justify any termination with a valid reason.
Moreover, employees in Germany have to form a works-related council at any workplace which has at least five permanent employees; notice periods are longer, and fixed-term contracts are far more tightly controlled.
Given all the robust and widespread protection standard German labour law provides to workers, I can’t see how by sounding off at this, the German Catholic Employers’ Association hopes to win back hundreds of thousands which continue to flock from the Church.
Especially when it simultaneously refuses to address how the Church’s special labour laws deny its own workers extremely basic rights, such as the right to strike.
What is also proving a wedge between German Catholics and their Church is a growing dilemma over environmental and climate issues, something traditionally very close to German hearts.
On the one hand, the German Catholic Church pays lip-service to its theological commitment to protecting natural creation, inspired by Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’.
On the other hand, however, it has an extremely slow and often inconsistent practical response on the same issue.
Many German bishops tend to wax lyrical about sustainability, for example, but translating this into action has proved far more tricky.
Germany’s Catholic Church is shrouded in multiple layers of institutional secrecy, and the lack of a clear national governing structure means determining the exact amount of land it owns is fiendishly hard to establish.
There is extremely limited public disclosure and the fragmented nature of the Church’s decentralised administration makes all this even worse.
However, it is at least thought that the Church owns vast estates.
And over the years the assets of certain individual dioceses and archdioceses have also come to light – and it has been shocking.
In 2013, for example, the Diocese of Limburg faced scrutiny when Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst was removed for spending a startling €31 million on a luxurious residence.
And in 2015, the Archdiocese of Cologne disclosed that its assets totalled €3.35 billion ($3.82 billion), surpassing the Vatican’s reported wealth at that time.
It also revealed that an incredible €646 million of this was held in tangible assets – primarily property.
But the problem is not necessarily that the German Catholic Church owns a massive amount of land or property – although of course it is at the very least an awkward fact given that many major cities, including the capital, Berlin, are currently experiencing a housing shortage.
The real problem is that even though the Catholic Church is one of the country’s largest landholders, there is no transparent or binding national strategy for how this land is used or managed in ecological terms.
This means that old, inefficient buildings remain carbon-heavy, thousands of hectares of forests are neither protected or re-wilded, and valuable urban land is often left underused.
Furthermore, while other German institutions face increasing pressure to divest from polluting assets and reduce emissions, the Church’s decentralised structure shields it from both scrutiny and accountability.
Unlike a company or government body, the Catholic Church in Germany isn’t a single legal entity, rather is made up of independent dioceses, each with its own legal status under German public law.
This means thousands of parishes, religious orders and affiliated charities are also completely legally distinct.
In the same way, Catholic schools, hospitals, banks and welfare organisations (like Caritas), all operate within their own structure and leadership.
And instead of having a clear sense of leadership – and which might also be challenged and held to account – the German Catholic Church ends up operating as a baffling patchwork of elements, each operating on a shoulder-shrugging, “not-me-guv”-type basis, as each of the individual elements in the puzzle can simple claim “I’m not responsible for that”.
This extremely fractured administrative structure, as opposed to a unified national body, is definitely not a new concept for German society.
Unlike in the UK, where a centralised structure and national systems are commonplace, Germany is staunchly decentralised.
Each of the country’s 16 federal states, for example, sets its own school curricula, funds its own universities, maintains a separate police force and has healthcare managed through regionally based insurance funds, unlike the UK’s centralised National Health Service.
Germans take this extremely seriously and don’t like excuses, especially when it comes to the environment.
The country derives over 50 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources, with wind and solar leading the way, and as of 2024, around 29 per cent of its electricity came from wind alone.
Meanwhile, the country has over 2 million solar power installations and more than 20,000 onshore wind turbines, while cities like Freiburg are internationally recognised for sustainable urban design.
Germany also has one of the highest recycling rates in the world, consistently above 65 per cent, and unlike in the UK, the Green Party has formed part of the government and led several key ministries, including not just Climate, but also Foreign Affairs.
Given all of this, the German Catholic Church needs to get serious and act seriously on the environment if it wishes to stay popular.
But with many many dioceses lacking transparent climate policies, still investing in fossil fuels and with their vast land holdings being held without clear sustainability goals – as things stand, things do not look promising.
Even if there was a huge push for the German Church to embrace environmental policies, with no national body in assistance, it is unclear how individual dioceses could be enforced to maintain environmental standards, or how coordinating large-scale change across the Church could be attempted given that each diocese can simply ignore or delay action.
So, given all the above – and as you can see, there is a lot – away from the cataclysmic news coverage of these horrific child abuse scandals in the German Catholic Church, there remains something equally as dangerous for its existence.
And what that is, in essence, is those hundreds of thousands of Catholic Germans who right now are not giving explosive interviews to the press, are not putting up a fight with the secretive and Kafkaesque Church administrations – in fact, its those German Catholics who are not making a fuss at all.
No, they are doing something far, far more deadly for the Church in Germany.
They are simply taking a quiet walk to the local registry office to formally end their official membership of the Catholic Church.
Those that do stay may be doing so out of faith, or out of habit, or perhaps simply out of hope that things might change.
But the harsh reality remains that the German Catholic Church is no longer just facing an abuse crisis, it is very much mired in the midst of a larger crisis.
And unless it finds a way to connect belief with reality, tradition with credibility, and hierarchy with accountability, it won’t just lose members, it may even lose relevance for German society altogether.