Home truths for German Church

The Catholic faith is being eroded in Germany with fewer people going to Mass and confession, and declining vocations, the Pope told the country’s bishops last week. In a hard-hitting address during their ad limina visit to Rome, Francis said: “Whereas in the 1960s the faithful almost everywhere attended Mass every Sunday, today it is often less than 10 per cent.” He added that “one can truly speak of an erosion of the Catholic faith in Germany” and urged the bishops to “rediscover the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist.”

But the Pope, who spent time studying in Germany in 1986, urged the hierarchy not to try and rebuild from the wreckage of “the good old days” and instead be inspired by the early Christians.

He warned against a “growing institutionalisation” in the Church that puts too much trust in structures and should look more to lay volunteers, giving the example of the biblical figures Priscilla and Aquila. The German Church is well resourced thanks largely to an ecclesiastical tax.

“We always inaugurate new facilities, from which, in the end, the faithful are missing,” Francis said. “It is a sort of new Pelagianism, which puts its trust in administrative structures, in perfect organisations.”

The Pope stressed that church structures must be missionary rather than self-serving, a consistent theme of his ministry which is stressed in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, the blueprint document of this pontificate. Asked to comment on the Pope’s remarks. Cardinal Rein­hard Marx, the president of the Bishops’ Conference, told KNA news agency that the criticism applied not only to Germany but to the whole of the Western world.

“The Pope was not saying anything new,” Cardinal Marx said. “We, that is the German Bishops’ Conference, have been addressing these problems intensively for years. Pope Francis brought them up in order to warn us not to forget them, even if the answer is not in any way easy. It is a matter of how to proclaim the Gospel in a secular world, without the traditional pillars.”