New figures indicating that more than 400,000 Catholics disaffiliated in Germany in 2023 show that the Church is in a “comprehensive crisis,” Bishop Georg Bätzing said Thursday.
In a statement following the
publicationof new Church statistics June 27, the German bishops’ conference chairman insisted that the changes proposed by the country’s controversial “synodal way” were urgently needed.
“Reforms alone will not solve the Church crisis, but the crisis will worsen without reforms. And that is why change is necessary,” he
said.
Continued below.
Bishop Bätzing says new figures show Church is in a “comprehensive crisis.”
www.pillarcatholic.com
I wonder if it ever occurred to them that maybe their "synodal way" is what's driving people
out of the Church? That maybe people are fed up with clerical dog-and-pony shows, have decided that the Catholic Church is no different from Big Stu's All-Nite Church of the Living Polka, have shrugged their shoulders, and left?
We saw all of this in the United States right after Vatican II. Liberal clergy decided to impose all manner of nonsense on the laity, and a goodly number of the laity simply got disgusted with churches that looked like grain silos, git-tars, kazoos, and hippies, and just up and left. A huge number of priests left for the same reason. The hierarchy became alarmed, and decided that people were leaving not
because of the reforms, but because the reforms didn't go far
enough. As a result, some of the more lunatic-fringe prelates (e.g., Rembert Weakland, Roger Mahony) embraced even more radical ideas of architecture, music, and sexual oddity, believing that such would appeal to the laity and bring them back in greater numbers. The opposite took place; burning down the church in order to save it has proved to be nothing more than destructive to all involved.
St. John Paul the Great repaired a lot of the damage done by the Pepsi Generation, and by all accounts the younger clergy coming up now are overwhelmingly traditionalist and conservative; in the U.S., at least, there is a sea change happening, where younger people want authentic Catholicism. Unfortunately, to elderly flower-power gurus like Pope Francis, this is seen as "looking backwards"; he sees traditional Catholicism as "bitter clinging", to use Obama's term.
Where does this all lead? Well, I think liberal Catholicism is shooting itself in the foot and wailing that it's the fault of people who refuse to get with the program of wholesale "Do Whatever Ya Want" religion, while at the same time blithely ignoring the fact that it's the tradionalist conservatives who are the ones staying in the Church and are at Mass every Sunday----the ones leaving in droves are those who have decided the Church is no different from an inner-city encounter group, shook their heads, and said "What's the point?" as they departed. We are being left with a Faithful Remnant in the midst of a Great Falling Away. And what does that tell us? That Jesus is returning soon.
