The exodus from the Catholic Church in Germany continued last year with more than half a million people officially leaving - a new record - according to figures released by the German Bishops' Conference (DBK) on Wednesday.
In 2022, 522,821 members left, easily eclipsing the previous record set only the year before, when 359,338 people quit the church.
"The Catholic Church is dying an agonizing death before the eyes of the public," Thomas Schüller, an expert in Catholic canonic law at the University of Münster and close observer of the German Catholic Church, told dpa.
In Germany, the remaining 20,937,590 Catholics make up 24.8% of the total population, according to 2022 figures.
It was already apparent in early 2022 that the dramatic exodus of members from the Catholic Church in Germany would continue accelerating.
The number of people formally quitting the church exploded in January last year after the release of a report on sexual abuse cases in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising.
The report raised questions about the handling of reports of abuse by late pope emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, who had previously served as archbishop in the Bavarian diocese.
The president of the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), Irme Stetter-Karp, called the ongoing loss of members "a blatant crisis" for the church and said she was "sad but not surprised" by the figures released on Wednesday.
"The church has lost trust, especially with the abuse scandal," Stetter-Karp said, but it has also not shown enough determination in adapting the church for the future.
"We urgently need reforms in the church. It is shameful that we now have to fight within the church for its very continued existence," Stetter-Karp said.
In the first weeks of January 2022, before the report's release, an average of about 80 people were leaving the church every weekday in Munich. After the report was presented on January 20, the number of people filing paperwork to leave the church each day in Munich nearly doubled.
Allegations of false statements against the controversial Cologne Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, whose offices were raided by German police on Tuesday, and legal disputes over compensation for victims of abuse in Cologne and in Traunstein in Upper Bavaria also made headlines last year.
Registered members of the Catholic Church in Germany, as well as most Protestant denominations and some other religious communities, must pay an additional tax collected by the government that goes to support their church.
Schüller said that many causes play a role in accelerating the departure of Catholics from the church but that the unfolding scandal in Cologne has created a "whirlpool which is pulling in all the other dioceses and even the Protestant churches."
Schüller warned that the exodus of members from Germany's Catholic Church would also impact services offered by the church, including schools, day-care centres and social care facilities.
The withering of the church will significantly change the entire country over the long term, Schüller said, including through "the loss a cornerstone of a social and educational system that cannot be replaced."
Mainstream Protestant churches in Germany have also been losing growing numbers of members. The Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), the dominant association of Protestant churches in the country, reported that the number of church members fell by 2.9%, or about 380,000 people, to just over 19 million.
Churches in the EKD lost 2.6% of their members in 2021.
