At CNA I saw something that shocked but didn’t surprise.
German exodus: Half a million Catholics abandon Church in historic departure
The Catholic Church in Germany is facing an unprecedented crisis, with more than half a million baptized Catholics leaving the Church in 2022, according to figures released by the German Bishops’ Conference on June 28.
This marks the highest number of departures ever recorded, with 522,821 people choosing to leave the Church, according to CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language partner news agency.
The total number of departures, including deaths, exceeded 708,000, a stark contrast to the 155,173 baptisms and 1,447 new members recorded during the same period. The figures reveal a historic negative trend, with the number of departures doubling from over 270,000 in 2020 to the current record.
[…]
The figures do not include data on confession, as the sacrament is not included in the bishops’ conference statistics.
And the Germans fiddle with their high-strung SynodalWeg (“zusammen spazieren”).
I wonder what might help the German Church regain its credibility?
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If the SSPX would be able to buy or build some churches in Germany, now is as best a time as it gets!
Only the true and apostolic teachings of the One, Holy, Catholic Church and her traditions can begin a turn around of the faith in this country lost as it is on the sin-nodal way to perdition.
These figures never dissuade the “progressives”. Never. Their answer is always,
“More, more, we need more doctrinal deviation! People are leaving because we’re not RELEVANT! We need to be more RELEVANT, i.e., encourage and affirm the deviant practices of the minority. More Synodality!”
These people will literally go to their grave believing in a god of their own manufacture. They’ll be like Desmond Tutu, who infamously remarked he wouldn’t want to be with a God who didn’t approve sodomy (or words to that effect).
I am told by my betters that religion is antithetical to science, progress and civilization. But look at Europe. All those officially atheist countries in Eastern Europe vanished virtually unmourned, having left nothing whatsoever positive to remember them by. And what has been the result of the de-Christianization in Western Europe, not to mention a decline in the number of Jews of some 90% since 1939? A stagnant, demographically-doomed society obsessed with thoughts of a climate apocalypse.
How many of these defections are simply good Catholics not wanting to pay the church tax imposed by the German government on those declaring themselves as Catholics or Lutherans? The Vatican has repeatedly stated that a Catholic can be in good standing and not pay the tax and Pope Benedict XVI criticized the existence of this tax (it has made the German Church wealthy and neglectful of Catholics since it does not need their donations). Yet the German hierarchy almost literally excommunicates you for not paying the tax by stating you are ineligible to receive any Sacraments. If I were a Catholic who already had all my Sacraments (except Extreme Unction of course), I would take myself of the official list of Catholics (and not fund the currently heretical German Church) since I could still anonymously go to confession and Communion and I doubt a true priest would ask for tax status before anointing a dying person.
Dear Brazilian Trad: The SSPX is already in Germany and has been for some time: https://fsspx.de/de/content/3275
It’s method acting. The German bishops pretend to care about the “marginalized” and, so, to really make it look real, they marginalize themselves.
“When the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
How many of these defections are simply good Catholics not wanting to pay the church tax imposed by the German government on those declaring themselves as Catholics or Lutherans?
Not many, though there are some.
The Vatican has repeatedly stated that a Catholic can be in good standing and not pay the tax
That misconception has been repeatedly told by those who in their all too understandable grudge wish to have a weapon against their local hierarchs when they are failing. But that’s wrong.
(A somewhat similar situation to those that postulate that when Pope St. Pius V wrote something about what “any hierarch, even if he were a metropolitan or a cardinal” cannot do and failed to explicitly add “but the Pope can” would somehow by its own legislative power bind future Popes. Here too the grudge against future liturgical mismanagement by Popes is all too understandable. But that’s wrong too. [By which I do not mean that the idea that Popes have not the right to suppress rites is indefensible. But its defence must be based on other grounds than “see here, the Pope decreed that once”.])
What the Vatican actually has said – for those, forgive me, who beyond trying to detect where the wind blows from in the manner of Kremlin astrologers actually have a mind to read what actually stands there – is that declaring one’s Kirchenaustritt does not in itself constitute “formal defection from the Catholic faith”, which is something that until 2009 had certain effects for attempted marriages, but has since ceased to have any effect at all.
That is all. It really is all.
Of course Pope Benedict didn’t like the Church tax (though he did not dislike it as much as to when he was Pope order the German bishops publicly, under mortal sin, to cease demanding it; he could have); neither do I. But we all have learnt one must not commit even the slightest sin in even the greatest justifiable self-defence to achieve even the greatest good possible (you can self-defend with mere violence, but that is because it ceases to be sinful is such a situation; but not with a sin) … – the only option for tax-evasion left is emigration from Germany.
(We need to make ourselves clear that the Kirchenaustritt consists of publicly declaring that one is no longer a Catholic, and signing the statement.)
Imrahil,
Thank you for these details!
Do you happen to have any English-language recommendations for the history of the Kirchensteuer (Church tax)? It seems odd to me (as someone who decided not to become a lawyer) that there would be no recourse for members of the Church, or, say, ‘bodies’ within the Church (such as a religious Order), to refuse to pay the tax on the grounds of mistrust by them precisely as faithful Catholics that it will be Faithfully well spent.
What, for example, of the FSSPX in Germany? Does it as body and do its ‘members’ merely pay the tax, receiving no benefit from it, though recognizedly not in schism and with those in its Orders having various recognized clerical faculties?
Dear Venerator Sti Lot,
Do you happen to have any English-language recommendations for the history of the Kirchensteuer (Church tax)?
Recommendations, as in: books and stuff? No, I am afraid not.
The principle, though, is that it really is a tax: after all, even a quite patriotic German (or American) cannot opt out of paying his taxes to the German (or American) federacy on the grounds that he suspects (and quite possibly suspects rightly) it will be partly misused. No matter how big the part in “partly” is.
The history is that apparently, the Church tax is part of how the Church is financed after temporal rule over part of the country was taken away from her in 1803. (Money flowing directly from the State was another part, and still exists as well, but is something different.)
The basis for all that is
1. Art. 137 sect. 6 of the Constitution of the German Reich, 1919 (remained part of the Constitution in 1949):“Those religious societies who have the status of juridical persons of public nature are entitled to raises taxes on the basis of the civil taxation lists, in a manner further to be detailed by state laws.”
2. Canon 1263: The diocesan bishop is entitled […] to demand a moderate […] tax from the public juridical persons subject to his leadership; as for the other, natural and juridical, persons he only may demand a tax in case of great emergency […], notwithstanding particular laws and customs which grant him further rights.
The latter part is apparently called “clausula teutonica” in canonistics. It means that while usually only juridical persons can be taxed (e. g., to finance the diocese when all people only ever think of giving money to parishes), the German bishops have the local privilege to tax their diocesans personally.
Note that both State and Church law only ever speak of something bishops are entitled to. They would not need to. Hence the idea that some have that secular forces within the state use it to discourage people from being Catholic is bogus. :Historically, you just didn’t leave the Church; legally, the bishops can at any time abolish the Church tax with a stroke of the pen (and I believe even each diocesan bishop could do so for his own diocese); and matter-of-factly, our secularists don’t actually favor the Church tax: they oppose it for being a cooperation of Church and state.
– This tax now, the Church could collect by her own office, which some denominations do, but as a matter of fact it is directly cut off by the State’s finance office, in a sort of win-win cooperation: the State gets a fee, much more than the additional effort of deducting it costs, but the Church pays much less than having a taxcollecting infrastructure would cost her.
A consequence of that, though, is, that “let’s just not pay, and see what the Church does about it” is simply technically not an option.
Of course, if you are a non-Catholic you don’t have to pay the Church tax. Hence, what some now do, is to state to the German citizen office that they are not Catholics. It is true that some good Catholics apparently can square it with the conscience to do so; I cannot, and my opinion is that it is objectively wrong. – To be fair, their argument is “I am only leaving the Catholic-Church-juridical-person-of-public-nature, but I do remain in the Catholic Church.” That is, alas, objectively wrong too though; other than in Switzerland, the juridical-person-of-public-nature is not an institution separate from the diocese, but simply a status of the diocese herself. – Anyway, though by discussion in orthodox circles one can get a different impression, by far most of Church-leaving is still done by those who really don’t want to belong to the Church any-more, or are (what is perhaps worse) of an “I-don’t-care-whether-I’m-in-the-Church-but-want-to-save-the-money” attitude. (Very often, the Church is left when the first real salary arrives.)
As for the FSSPX: As a body, it does not pay the tax because bodies don’t pay it anyway. Those who go to Mass there (and I guess the priest members to) are pretty much normal orthodox Catholics in this respect (as in many but not all other respects): Some have acted upon those opinions I described and hold erroneous; most haven’t. The percentage of the former may be slightly higher [*], but this is it. They routinely remind their Mass-adherents: “We do not receive money from the Church tax, you ought to give us some” – which in itself proves that they presume their adherents to be quite normal German Catholics, who being German Catholics will naturally tend to think that the upkeep of Churches is automatically taken care of.
[* Alas, the FSSPX “Mitteilungsblatt” once forwarded the opinion-I-described-and-hold-erroneus. But even that, tellingly enough, was not part of a campaign, but simply “we’ve received information from others, checked it and think that’s good for you to know”. I found that highly imprudent, as in my view they should focus especially on not appearing schismatic… but still by its intention etc. it had nothing specifically FSSPX-ish about it, nor does it seem to have had the effect of singling them out.]