Almost 360,000 German Catholics left the Church during the course of 2021, the German Bishops Conference (DBK) announced on Monday.
"For us, that's the highest number to date," DBK spokesperson Matthias Kopp said in Bonn. A total of 359,338 Catholics left the church in 2021.
The German Catholic Church counted 21,645,875 members at the end of 2021, equivalent to 26% of the German population.
DBK chairperson Georg Bätzing said he was "deeply shaken by the extremely high number of people leaving the Church." He added that the numbers were an indication of the "deep crisis that we as the Catholic Church in Germany find ourselves in."
In 2020, 221,390 left the church, while in 2019 – the year before the pandemic – the figure was 272,711.
