It's emblematic of Europe in general and the "de-baptism" movement, but Germany's clergy is especially egregious in wishing to go their "Synodal Way" and embracing not one, but several heretical propositions all at once. See, progressives believe that if they cave in to the zeitgeist and liberalize doctrines, and become more "inclusive and accepting" where anything goes, they believe that they will bolster their numbers and enjoy an influx of people to worship with them. However, they're only following in the footsteps of a revolution from 500 years ago, which just didn't work out so well. Nobody wants a watered down faith that doesn't judge. Why be Christian at all?
Charismatic Evangelical churches are the growth sector in church attendance. If your church offers a vaguely apocalyptic isolationist version of faith, you're going to attract plenty of scared conservative folk who don't like how fast the world is changing, and who want simpler answers to how to fix it. That those answers are _wrong_ doesn't matter, because that kind of ignorance among the laity is a _feature_ that guarantees more control and higher income.
> Nobody wants a watered down faith that doesn't judge. Why be Christian at all?
Truly spoken like Jesus himself. /s
Meanwhile I have to wonder if, like in Ireland, this is all just down to people losing their faith in an institution that spends vast time and energy protecting pedophiles.
Couldn’t agree more. And I’m not even catholic. The German catholic Church is often in open opposition to Rome, and in general behaving like the typical LinkedIn Company profile page during pride month.
All fine by me but if your main zeitgeist you want to appeal to is the same as Nike’s and other soulless marketing endeavors don’t expect to be held to a higher esteem than said rainbow-washed corporate marketing materials
> Nobody wants a watered down faith that doesn't judge. Why be Christian at all?
When you actually read the Gospel, you will realize that Jesus was actually the guy who was the least judging. He ended up being called "a friend of tax collectors and sinners". And somehow the Church became something else, with several attempts over centuries to go back to the source. Sometimes they would split like Luther, sometimes they would try to do their thing inside like Francis d'Assisi, but each time it started with a negation of the status quo.
"You hypocrites, scribes and Pharisees!"
"You Pharisees, brood of vipers!"
"The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you have now is not your husband."
"Woe to you, Chorazin and Bethsaida!"
"You have turned [this temple] into a den of thieves!"
"It would be better for him if he had never been born."
"Get thee behind me, Satan!"
Now those are the negative judgements. Of course a positive and favorable judgement is, likewise, judgement, even if you want to conveniently omit that from your assessment: Jesus had a lot of blessings to pronounce and salvation to announce and people to send to Heaven, those are, indeed, judgements that He made, so if you want to say that "Jesus was actually the guy who was the least judging" then you're going to erase all the good He does, and that'd be a crying shame.
Judgement is central to Christ's mission. We want to be judged by Him and nobody else. We stand before Him at every confession and receive His judgement. "He will come again to judge the living and the dead" is built into our Creed. The righteous should absolutely welcome and anticipate His judgement with great joy. Because He is the most humble and meek and kindest Judge that you could ever meet.
I’m not sure it really matters how liberal or conservative the church is. Fewer and fewer people in developed countries believe. Churches will presumably reflect the values of the societies they serve but shrink as fewer feel drawn to them.
I grew up in the similarly liberal English Catholic tradition, going to state funded Catholic schools. I never really believed in God but I retain an affection for the values of tolerance and charity they espoused, to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’. Had they been more conservative I suspect the school would not have been as popular.
I never saw the attraction of Richard Dawkins brand of atheism as the type of fundamentalist Christianity it attacked was so different to my experience of liberal Catholicism. But I did consider debaptism when the English Cardinal started going on homophobic rants. It seemed antithetical to the values of our congregation. Then it came out he was a closeted gay man and the public homophobia was a way of covering that up.
This is really one hell of a take… you don’t think it maybe has something to do with the hundreds of kids they are fucking and lying about it? No, It’s the damned progressives instead?
It’s literally there in the subheading which I will quote:
“Speed of departures has been driven by series of child abuse scandals and accusations of a cover-up”
It has? Does the church treat children even worse elsewhere?
I suppose in a way, people are leaving now because of things that happened long ago. I live in Munich, there was a children's home outside the city where the adults did not behave at all nicely. Decades ago. It's just that it's being published now and people are reacting now. But one could also say that people are reacting because they think the current bishop acted to protect one of the criminals, only a few years ago.
I personally think that people might forgive what happened long ago, but don't because the current clerical leadership tried to hush things up and protect the guilty priests only five years ago.
I think this is a very German-centric view of things.
Firstly, priests treating children inappropriately is not a differentiator between the German Catholic Church and that of other countries.
Secondly, at least from an anglo-saxon angle, men treating children inappropriately is not a differentiator between the Catholic Church and the rainbow faction.
I agree it's a German-centric view, but I also think it's the view that matters.
Beat or rape a child, and people will form an opinion of you based on your action and their views of what you did, local to their cultures. They won't say "well, your employer's local branch is more liberal than its branches in other countries", see? If you're a manager (a bishop, say) and protect your subordinate who did the beating or raping, people will again judge you by their values, German-centric in this case, not by comparing you to similar management in branches in other countries.
"I'm going to stay in the church because priests here may have raped children and the bishops protected them, but the Irish branch did worse" isn't reasonable. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fnord-n1253862 BTW. "I'm going to leave the church because I don't see myself as the kind of person who belongs to a community where priests rape and bishops protect them" is a more reasonable sentiment, and it's local.
I mean, i've heard a lot more people saying they were abused by priests as a child than any other professions, and i was quite deep in a youth camp counselor association where we had to handle some cases (swiftly and with prejudice, i think we sued, either directly or with the parents 3 times on the 4 cases i was aware of, the case where we didn't sue was a weird case of harassment we weren't sure was sexual, he lost his certificate and was forbidden from getting it again, but no criminal record nor citation).
I think the number of deranged pedophiles in all profession should be equal, only the opportunity differs, and our main difference with the church is that we don't protect our criminals (and writing this, i think i have an idea on why the distrust of police force grew that fast in 20 years).
That's an unexpected twist for modern Germany, officially registering people's faiths. And letting those faiths tax their members, is an interesting cherry on top.
Sweden does this as well. If you're a member of the Swedish Lutheran Church, an item is added to your tax bill. Other churches can ask their members to register as such with the tax authority and dues are collected via that route.
If you're not a member (I left the church years ago) you still pay a small proportion to cover burial costs and the upkeep of historical church buildings.
Germany publishes a lot of statistics. You can read up-to-date counts of how many people live in each city, how many people had their tonsils removed, how many people had breast enlargement, how many people pay income tax, how many people are church members. But you can't get this information about any single person. Not even the state can get that, even though most of that data is collected (and the statistics published) by public bodies. Cities can't reveal much to their encompassing states or the federal things, states can't reveal... and so on, and it's all handled very strictly.
The federal minister responsible for fighting covid didn't even have a precise count of the number of people vaccinated. That's how strictly people's data are treated.
If it's only a matter of time... don't hold your breath, this has been basically unchanged for seventy years.
This is quite inspiring news, and the fact that people are leaving "for cause" based on malfeasance of leadership is even more heartening.
>All Germans who declare an affiliation to the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish denominations are officially registered as such with their local authorities. They are liable to pay the Kirchensteuer or Kultursteuer (church tax or cultural tax), which amounts to between 8% and 9% of a person’s income tax and is drawn from their monthly income by the tax office, which passes it on to the appropriate denomination.
>Those who wish to leave have to officially renounce their membership, a process known as a Kirchenaustritt, or church withdrawal, by actively visiting the local register office and paying a €30 administrative fee.
>The church tax was first enshrined in German law in 1919 and reaffairmed in the Reichskoncordat between Nazi Germany and the Vatican in 1933. It was reaffirmed in law again in 1949.
The Catholic Church and the Nazi government were known to be one in the same during the lead up to and during WWII but the fact that the church and state are still so intermingled in 2023 is absolutely baffling. Why is this even still the case today?
There is nothing unusual about this, except for the fact that Germany's state support extends to a plurality of churches rather than just one. Before the disestablishment of state churches, it was natural and common for the state to support the Church, including through taxation and mandatory tithes. My Greek friend informs me that Eastern Orthodoxy is still run this way, but more straightforward since there is only one established Church to fund and operate. I am not sure how many other Orthodox nations support their established Church through taxation, but yeah, it's normal.
Its not. The idea is to have a stable income for religious institutions.
Its an issue for mosques in Germany, as currently the funds have to come from one generous donor or foreign countries, who may ultimately have their own goals, keeping the mosque from being independent.
"because that's how we've always done it", and the churches still are influential enough that nobody opposed to it wants to spend the political capital on it, compared to all the other things that need fixing (and you can't just opt-out of) when there isn't a "Christian" party in power.
I was raised in the Church, and from what I remember it's... complicated. Like most everything involving the Vatican.
The Church definitely didn't use its voice to actively denounce the NSDAP. In retrospect it's obvious that it should have done so, but at the time it wasn't a foregone conclusion that the Nazis would lose the war - and wouldn't spread. The Church was protecting its ability to continue to exist. You also have to consider the context of the times; the Russians at the time were <20 years into their explicit campaign to stamp out religion in general and convert their nation to state atheism.
None of the above excuses the actions of the Church regarding Naziism, of course. I'm just sharing my understanding of why they behaved as they did at the time, based on my recollection of the catechism classes I took ~30 years ago.
I agree. My answer was partial (in both sense of the word), so thank you for providing a more balanced view.
I was also raised in the Church (still part of it, too), but my catechism classes didn't really covered much history of the Church (I think I learned just as much from my school classes).
> I was also raised in the Church (still part of it, too),
FWIW, I don't really have anything against the RCC - at least, nothing that doesn't apply equally to several Protestant denominations, including the one that I consider myself to belong to :).
> but my catechism classes didn't really covered much history of the Church
I hear that. My catechism classes were a joke, honestly. I remember keeping a notebook full of questions to ask the parish priest the next time I saw him. After a half dozen times of that, he suggested that he come to our CCD class once a month to answer everyone's questions at once. He put out a "questions box" so people could drop in whatever they were curious about without having to raise their hand and ask.
