Statistics released by the Catholic Church in Germany reveal that 162,093 Catholics left the Church in Germany during 2016 and 537 additional parishes were closed down.
Since 1996, the Catholic population in Germany has shrunk from 27,533,000 to 23,582,000—a decline of over 14 percent.
The number of Catholic parishes has followed a similar trend.
During the past 20 years, the Catholic Church in Germany has shut down nearly a quarter of its parishes (over 3,000), with the number declining from 13,329 to 10,280.
Sunday Mass attendance continues to drop as well, with 10.2 percent attending Mass regularly in 2016 versus 10.4 percent in 2015.
The situation is so dire that Pope Francis cited statistic after statistic before a group of German Bishops, asking why the Church in Germany is in freefall.
Francis noted there has been “a drastic drop in Sunday Mass attendance” and in the whole of Catholic sacramental life in Germany, especially in traditionally Catholic areas.
“Whereas in the 1960s wherever you went almost every Catholic participated in Sunday Mass,” he said, “nowadays it’s often less than ten percent. Fewer and fewer receive the sacraments and the Sacrament of Penance has all but disappeared.”
“Fewer and fewer Catholics receive the Sacrament of Confirmation or get married in church,” he added, “and the number of vocations to the Priesthood and consecrated life is severely diminished.”
Perhaps the fact that Catholics are forced to contribute to the Church by being charged a special church tax or “Kirchensteuer,” has contributed to these mass defections. Perhaps the German Bishops ever-increasing shift away from traditional Catholic belief and practice toward a position often associated with mainline Protestantism is to blame.
In a recent interview with the Italian newspaper Il Foglio, Cardinal Gerhard Müller—the former head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office—commented on the decline of the German Church.
Muller and his brother-Bishops seek to conveniently blame this exodus on everyone and everything but themselves.
Yet, the fact is the Bishops in Germany have become so comfortable in their compromises with the secularism so prevalent in Europe that the transmission of the legacy of Faith from the present to future generations is no longer seen by them to constitute the essential mission of the Church.
Germany itself has been in the forefront of the de-Christianization of Europe. Germany has sponsored repeated calls for a European Union devoid of its Christian heritage. Germany has welcomed the mass influx of non-Christian Islamic immigrants and refugees who are hostile to Western values and Christianity itself.
And, in almost every case, the German Bishops have been either silent or actively complicit.
Is it any wonder, then, that Catholicism and religion itself for that matter have been so de-valued in Germany and, under its influence, throughout the rest of Europe.
The Scriptures tell us quite explicitly that, as we reap, we shall sow.
The German Bishops, so intent on fostering a convenient relationship with the State for revenue and so anxious to promote progressive agendas which compromise traditional Catholic doctrine and discipline, are now confronted with fields of desolation in the ranks of the faithful.
Sadly, Germany is the harbinger of the future of the Church among the nations of the West, as the world itself continues its steady inexorable march backward from civilization to the barbarism of the past where the State dictated one’s value, where the State decided upon one’s usefulness, where the State dictated one’s right to life.
Devoid of the virtues and values of the Gospel and the nourishment of the Sacraments of the Church, Germany and the secularism it promotes for itself and Europe has embarked upon a journey toward doom and annihilation.
And the German Bishops are locked arm-in-arm, goose stepping their way to oblivion.
The rest of Europe is not far-behind. And neither is America.
What thinkest you?
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