Berlin - In recent hours, the German Bishops’ Conference, which since 24 February 2026 has had a new president, Bishop Heiner Wilmer, released the provisional figures for the 2025 ecclesial statistics. The overall picture confirms that the Catholic Church in Germany continues to shrink: the number of Catholics fell from 19,769,237 in 2024 to 19,219,601 in 2025, a loss of 549,636 faithful in a single year. It is true that formal departures declined, falling from 321,659 to 307,117, but the overall data do not justify optimistic readings: the haemorrhage is slowing, but it has not stopped, and to speak of a genuine reversal of the trend would be misleading.
The most delicate signal concerns the transmission of the faith. Baptisms fell again, from 116,274 in 2024 to 109,028 in 2025. Over the same period, funerals remained vastly higher in number, even though they fell from 213,046 to 203,496. The figures provide a clear picture of the վիճe of a German Church that is unable to regenerate itself either demographically or ecclesially: deaths continue to far outnumber new entries through baptism. It is a long-term indicator, more important than the year-on-year fluctuations in departures, because it offers a picture of the crisis in generational replacement.
In essence, while the German and Austrian episcopates - with figures such as Josef Grünwidl - focus their discourse on issues such as the role of women and the need to make the Church more socially attractive, an increasing number of faithful continue to walk away. It is a clear signal: many are not asking for a Church which, in Germany as in Austria, is perceived above all when it demands payment of the church tax, but for a community capable of offering real means for the life of faith. Otherwise, the risk is that it will appear more and more as a space of power and social positioning, rather than as a place of Christian life. The picture also worsens on the level of family life, in the light of the published data. Religious marriages collapsed from 22,513 to 19,478, a drop of more than three thousand celebrations in a single year. It is one of the heaviest figures in the entire survey, because it shows that this is not simply a matter of a reduction in the number of registered Catholics, but of the thinning of the concrete bond between the Church and the decisive passages of life. If baptisms point to the crisis in the initial transmission of the faith, marriages tell of the weakening of its social and public hold.
There are, certainly, also some figures that run against the trend. First Holy Communions rose from 151,702 to 152,357, and confirmations from 105,041 to 105,334: a slight increase, essentially amounting to stability. Admissions and re-admissions also increased: in 2024 there were 1,839 admissions and 4,743 re-admissions; in 2025 these rose to 2,269and 5,443 respectively. But even here the figures should not be overstated. The total number of admissions and returns in 2025 reached 7,712, while departures still stood at 307,117. The balance therefore remains plainly negative.
The figure for participation at Sunday Mass deserves even closer attention. The percentage rose from 6.6% in 2024 to 6.8% in 2025. But in absolute terms, the average number of attendees fell from 1,306,000 to 1,304,000. In other words, there are not more practising Catholics: there are slightly fewer. What has increased is only the percentage share out of the total number of Catholics, because the overall base has narrowed. This is a decisive detail, because it prevents a statistical effect from being mistaken for a genuine pastoral revival.
The ecclesial geography also confirms a profound transformation. In the eastern Länder, where Catholics are few in number and live in a situation of diaspora, religious practice is far higher than the national average. In 2025, Saxony recorded 13.0% Mass attendance, Thuringia 12.5%, and Saxony-Anhalt 10.3%. By contrast, the western territories, historically more established, show much lower percentages: Saarland 4.1%, Schleswig-Holstein 4.7%, Rhineland-Palatinate 5.3%, and North Rhine-Westphalia 5.4%. The phenomenon was already evident in 2024 and is confirmed again in 2025. And this brings out an underlying pattern: in Germany, minority Catholicism appears more practising than traditional Catholicism. And this brings to mind the words of Joseph Ratzinger: “From the crisis of today there will emerge, this time too, a Church that will have lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to fill many of the buildings she built in more prosperous times. Along with a good many of her adherents, she will also lose many of her social privileges. Much more than before, she will present herself as a community entered only by free decision. As a small community, she will make much greater demands on the initiative of her individual members. She will certainly discover new forms of ministry and will ordain mature Christians who have pursued a profession: in many smaller communities and in homogeneous social groups the normal pastoral care will be exercised in this way. Alongside all this, as before, the priest will be indispensable. But in all these changes that one may presume, the Church will find anew and with full conviction what is essential to her, what was always at her centre: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, and in the assistance of the Spirit, which will endure until the end.”
The published data also show the continuing weight of the large western regions, where the greatest number of departures is still concentrated. In 2025, North Rhine-Westphalia recorded 83,440 departures, Bavaria 81,864, and Baden-Württemberg 49,061. These figures are lower than in 2024, when the same Länder recorded 115,431, 106,663 and 63,836 departures respectively. But even this reduction is not enough to change the overall meaning of the phenomenon: the great German Catholic strongholds in the West continue to empty out.
What emerges, then, is the transition from a phase of more violent collapse to one of structural contraction. The Catholic Church in Germany is not regaining momentum; it is becoming smaller, older and more clearly a minority. Departures remain enormous, baptisms continue to fall, religious marriages are declining further, and the slight increase in the percentage attending Sunday Mass does not correspond to any real increase in the number of practising faithful. The figures for 2025 do not tell the story of a rebirth. Rather, they describe a Church that continues to lose social, cultural and demographic weight, while still showing, in some areas, a minority that is more convinced and more cohesive.
The fact that all this is happening precisely while a strongly ideologised current is trying to drag the Church onto ground alien to her nature, through the German synodal path, ought to lead both Rome and Germany to examine the matter seriously. These figures must be read as an unequivocal response to certain social experiments which, far from strengthening ecclesial life, seem instead to have contributed to drawing it still further away from its mission.
fr.G.V.
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