Apparently it lost half-a-million parishioners in 2022 alone (2.4% of all German Catholics), adding to the 360,000 who left in 2021.

There are many reasons for this, including the same sort of sex scandals that the church has inflicted on itself in other parts of the Western world. There’s also the rising tide of secularism in Germany, powered by the old parts that were Communist East Germany (which also happens to be the base for the AfD – so much for that theory about the Right Wing).

Specific to Germany is also a church tax, the kirchensteur system; if you’re a registered Catholic money is automatically withdrawn from your income by the state and redistributed to your diocese (with a small fee subtracted by your friendly, helpful government). You can read the details at the link but it’s not hard to imagine, in these tough economic times, people de-registering from the Church to save some money.

But I also can’t help wondering if the following is also responsible:

Ye Gods! Religious music is supposed to induce feelings of transcendence, awe, joy, peace, calm. Think of Gregorian Chants or the wonderful Three Masses by William Byrd, as performed by The Tallis Scholars. BTW, Byrd was a English Catholic at a time when that was dangerous but his music was so beloved that Protestant friends kept him safe and his pieces appear in Anglican circles to this day.

Can one really pray with a calmed soul after hearing that?

Now I rather like Ambient music, especially the original stuff by the great Brian Eno (I started in the early 80’s with Music For Airports) that started the whole genre, and that’s a certain taste many people don’t get. But I have to say that this is like listening to cats yowling while being strangled – and that’s before we get to the discordant organ playing.

Perhaps it’s just a thing with Germany, and specifically with the city of Cologne, because I found another example of such music here from 2019. TRIGGER WARNING: you are advised to click only to check out the horrifying reality; thirty seconds should do it.

If you have been masochistic enough to listen to all of that let me give you a chance to repair your wounded ears (and soul).

Oh, and if you’re interested in discussion about the next Pope…

if New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan is an accurate weathervane of the direction the Church is headed, then things don’t look good. This Lenten season, he posted a video not about Lent, but about the start of Ramadan for our “Islamic brothers and sisters,” and how our Ash Wednesday is “kind of like our Ramadan.” 
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Keep it up, Cardinal Dolan, and you’ll simply continue to drive away committed Catholics, just as the Pride and BLM signs drove away committed Presbyterians, just as the erasure of traditional marriage drove away committed Methodists, and just as the submission of the Archbishop of Canterbury to eventual sharia law drove away committed Anglicans.
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Pope Francis and too many cardinals and bishops have not spent their time defending the Church. Quite the opposite. And speaking personally from my own conversations with fellow Catholics, we are sick of it. We are sick of the deference to hostile political ideologies. We’re sick of the pandering to wokeness. We’re sick of the anti-American and anti-Western bigotry being spewed under the guise of compassion. Many of us are one papal election away from leaving the Church permanently or, at any case, at least until it gets its act together and gives us a pope worthy of the seat of St. Peter.

Finally, this is not really about Catholicism, or Christianity or even The West. It’s about the struggle between ugliness and beauty, which parallels the struggle between evil and good. Herewith another example of beauty that predates all the above, and which I would listen to every day of the week and twice on Sunday in preference to that jarring clown show in Cologne.