The Catholic Church is losing members in droves
Published: Sunday, Dec 10th 2023, 13:20
Retour au fil d'actualité
Members of the Roman Catholic Church in Switzerland have been fleeing in droves since the publication of the study on abuse. This was revealed by a survey conducted by the Keystone-SDA news agency three months after the publication of a report containing over a thousand cases of abuse.
The wave of resignations appears to be particularly high in the Catholic parish of Lucerne, for example. Since the publication of the abuse study, 270 people per month have left, according to an inquiry. In 2022, there were 65 in the same period.
Adligenswil LU saw even more people leave the church by comparison. After the numerous abuses came to light, the parish was the first to decide to stop paying contributions to the diocese of Basel for the time being. 45 resignations have been counted since September in the community of 5500 inhabitants.
"Regular exodus"
Before the study, the average number of people leaving the Lucerne parish was three per month. Church warden Mirjam Meyer speaks of a "veritable exodus". It is now not only younger people who are leaving the church, but also loyal, long-standing members.
In the city of Zug, with around 12,000 Catholics, the number of people leaving the church is likely to have doubled since September. Church Council President Patrice Riedo expects 250 to 260 people to leave the Catholic Church in 2023.
There has been a veritable wave of resignations in Basel-Stadt. The number of departures rose from 36 to 174 between August and September. And the figures remained high in October (164) and November (115).
From the beginning of September to the beginning of December, 486 people left the Roman Catholic parish of Winterthur. In the two previous years, the figures were 158 and 161 respectively.
In the pastoral area of Bern and the surrounding area, the number of people leaving the church in 2023 is likely to be twice as high as in other years. After a significant increase in September, the figures fell again in November to the level prior to the publication of the abuse figures.
New maximum numbers
However, the publication of the abuse study also marks a turning point in Schwyz: the number of people leaving the church has shot up by over 500 percent since September to an average of 76. Previously, there had been an average of 12 resignations per month.
In Sarnen OW, there have been 128 resignations since September. For the year as a whole, the number of resignations is likely to rise to 205, compared to 90 in recent years. In Altdorf UR, where around 100 people usually leave each year, 139 have resigned their church membership since September.
According to the cantonal church of Aargau, the number of people leaving the church peaked in September. The figures have since fallen again. However, 2023 will be a record year.
Most resignations were recorded in urban areas in Aargau, Solothurn and Graubünden. There were parishes that recorded over 100 resignations, according to Graubünden.
"Symbolic act"
The Swiss Pastoral Sociological Institute St. Gallen (SPI) publishes the figures for church resignations in Switzerland every fall. Current information on developments following the disclosure of cases of abuse in the Catholic Church is therefore not available.
The cantonal differences in the number of people leaving the church each year are striking. For example, Geneva, Valais, Neuchâtel and Vaud regularly record practically no resignations. According to the SPI, this is due to the different organizational structures of the churches in these cantons.
As a rule, they do not have a membership structure under state-church law that is linked to the obligation to pay church tax and from which one could leave at all. Leaving the church is therefore a symbolic act in these cantons and those affected do not save any church tax.
According to the vicar general of the diocese of Sion, Pierre-Yves Maillard, there have only been five applications to leave the church in the parish of Saint-Maurice, for example, where the local abbey has been confronted with numerous serious allegations of abuse.
In the canton of Neuchâtel, around 20 applications to leave have been registered since September, instead of the usual 20 for the entire year. In Geneva, 45 applications to leave were received in 2023, 36 of them in September.
Ticino and the canton of Baselland do not disclose leaving figures to the SPI. When asked, the canton of Jura also said that there were no figures at the moment.
The Roman Catholic Church currently has around three million members in Switzerland, while the Protestant Reformed Church has around two million.
On September 12, the University of Zurich published a report on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. This documented 1002 cases in the Catholic Church in Switzerland since the middle of the 20th century.
©Keystone/SDA
French 
English 
German 
Spanish 
Arabic