Church - When God disappeared from Germany - A bishop takes stock
Most Germans no longer have anything to do with church and religion - that is the sobering assessment of the highest Catholic bishop at the turn of the year. "The loss of members is rapid, the social significance is dwindling", stated the Chairman of the German Bishops' Conference, Georg Bätzing, in his New Year's Eve sermon in Frankfurt am Main. "The majority of the population is barely approachable in religious terms."
The Limburg bishop backed up his sobering conclusion with a representative survey, the 6th Church Membership Survey (SME) of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). Catholics were also surveyed for the first time. Some of the results of the study published in November: the majority of the population no longer belong to either of the two major churches. 56 percent describe themselves as unreservedly non-religious. Only a third of all remaining church members say they are definitely not considering leaving the church. Bätzing's comment on this: "To suppress or play down such developments would be fatal."
Many people who leave the church say: "It doesn't change my faith in God." But the study shows that most people are fooling themselves. Without church practice, without a connection to a congregation, faith in God quickly evaporates. The majority of children of those who have left the church no longer have access to church and religion.
Bätzing: Large majority want change
Catholic hardliners often claim that the faithful are turning away from the church because it has made too many concessions to the zeitgeist. The Church must therefore return to its traditional teachings. However, the study - like many other representative surveys before it - shows that this is absolutely not the case for German Catholics.
As Bätzing explains: "An overwhelming 96% of Catholics say: "My church must change fundamentally if it wants to have a future." And by this they mean a positive approach to homosexuality, more co-determination for lay people (non-clergy), a marriage license for priests and greater cooperation with the Protestant Church. Bätzing concludes: "Reforms will certainly not solve all the problems of the Catholic Church, but they will worsen if there are no reforms."
Renewal processes such as the "synodal path" therefore remain urgently needed, as the Ruhr bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck, who is known as a reformer, also emphasized in his New Year's sermon. However, there should be no illusion that this will put a stop to dechurching. "We will have to endure and shape the fact that an increasing majority in our country does not want to belong to any religious community," Overbeck admitted frankly.
"We are not at the end"
That is why we urgently need to stop "clinging to a glorified form of the national church that probably never existed". After all, the reason why almost everyone used to go to church was not necessarily because everyone was 100 percent convinced of the existence of a Christian God, but because it simply corresponded to social expectations. It had a lot to do with pressure and rigid moral concepts implanted from above.
Few will regret the fact that this has now disappeared. But dechurching certainly does not only mean liberation and self-empowerment. The study also shows, for example, that church members do far more voluntary work than average, such as helping refugees. If this is no longer the case, everyday life in Germany is likely to become colder. The sociologist of religion Detlef Pollack, who grew up in the GDR, assumes that Western societies are much more strongly influenced by Christianity than their inhabitants themselves realize: "Values such as justice, compassion, humility - or as we say today: fairness, empathy, modesty - are very important," Pollack said in a recent interview. "People who come to Europe from outside notice these traces of Christianity very clearly."
At the end of his sermon, Bätzing himself asked what follows from all these insights. His answer: "We are not at the end. But a very specific social form of church is coming to an end."
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Source: www.stern.de
