THE two main Churches in Germany have reported a record fall in membership amid current hardships and controversies, despite recent efforts at reform and renewal.

“This high rate of departures is painful — especially knowing how much volunteers and full-time parish employees are devoted to others, and how important the Good News about a loving God is for them,”, the Bishop of Limburg, Dr Georg Bätzing, who chairs the Roman Catholic German Bishops’ Conference, explained.

“Far from resigning, however, we must continue to work consistently, enabling people to see and experience how we are on their side and acting for them.”

The Bishop spoke to journalists as new figures showed that a record 523,000 RCs had died or deliberately left the Church during 2022, compared with 359,000 the year before, which was already a record number.

The decline, most pronounced in traditionally Catholic Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, occurred despite changes and improvements proposed during the RC Church’s Synodal Way reform process, which ran from December 2019 until March this year.

The data also showed a continuing decline in the number of priests, currently about 12,000 nationwide. There were only 45 ordinations last year across all 27 German dioceses, and only a marginal upturn in baptisms and first communions since the pandemic.

In March, the country’s 20 regional Evangelical Churches reported a drop of 575,000, or 2.9 per cent, in their combined membership during 2022, mostly through withdrawal from the church tax system. Some Landeskirchen, such as Bavaria’s, showed a marked decline.

Presenting the figures, the Rt Revd Annette Kurschus, Praeses of Westphalia and President of the Council of the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD), described current trends as “depressing and worrying — especially for those involved full-time and voluntarily in the Evangelical Church”. She said that decisions to leave often followed a “cost-benefit analysis” in the face of high energy and living costs.

With 20.9 and 19.1 million members respectively, the RC Church and the EKD now represent, for the first time, less than half the German population of 84.5 million.

Both Churches issued public cautionary statements last week before Thursday’s Bundestag vote on legalising assisted dying, which was made possible by a Federal Constitutional Court ruling in 2020, reaffirming the right of German citizens to “self-determined dying”.