✣ Highlights from the week online
Germany: the good news
New figures suggest the German Church is undergoing a steep decline. According to statistics from the bishops’ conference, 200,000 Catholics left the Church last year (as recorded by who pays the Church tax) and attendance was down from 18.6 per cent of registered Catholics in 1995 to 10.4 per cent in 2015.
But Mark de Vries, blogger at In Caelo et in Terra, said there was some cause for optimism. The number of people leaving has fallen, and baptisms and marriages have shown a slight increase. In some dioceses, he wrote, baptisms are “more frequent than they were in 1995”, particularly in formerly communist east Germany. (This may be due to Polish immigration.)
