By IRNA,
Berlin : A record number of Germans have left the Catholic Church this year in wake of revelations about numerous massive abuse cases, daily newspaper Welt reported Wednesday.
While the official figures of German Catholics abandoning their church will be announced this coming summer, provisional numbers released by 10 out of a total of 27 Catholic dioceses in Germany reported that around 65,000 people have quit the church.
The number of Catholics deserting their church is expected to be ‘perhaps 20 percent higher’ than in 2009 when nearly 124,000 people left the church.
Germany’s Catholic Church is already facing its worst crisis since World War II in the aftermath of widening allegations of child sexual abuse by clerics.
Hundreds of former Catholic students have come forward with claims of clerical sex abuse, many dating back to the 1950s and 60s.
A hotline set up earlier this year by the Catholic Church in Germany to counsel victims of sexual abuse was jammed on its first day, with nearly 4,500 calls.
The disclosures have even dragged Pope Benedict XVI into the affair
as he has been linked directly and indirectly to the sex scandal in
Germany’s Catholic church.
Several institutions where sexual abuse or harassment took place are in south German state of Bavaria and well-known to the 82-year-old pontiff when he was Archbishop of Munich.
His proximity to the crime scene has rattled Catholic church leadership.