c. 1996 Religion News Service

BERLIN (RNS)-On the eve of a historic visit by Pope John Paul II to Berlin, pope-mania is breaking out. Commemorative memorabilia is on sale, TV talk-shows are filled with debates about religion, and city officials are still trying to figure out where to park the buses that will bring an estimated 130,000 Catholics from all over Germany and Poland to Berlin’s Olympic Stadium.

Yet for all the frenzied activity surrounding the pope’s June 23 visit, his first to a unified Berlin, the German Catholic Church is facing one of its most profound crises since the Reformation. Record numbers of Catholics are leaving the church, and many of those who remain are leaving the pews empty.

The cause of ecclesiastical reform is also being increasingly championed by a whole generation of reform-minded Catholics who are becoming impatient at the grassroots level.”There’s a mood of profound dissatisfaction among German Catholics. No one quite knows where it’s going to lead to, but there are many in the church hierarchy who are quite worried,”says Christian Weisner, a Hanover resident who heads Germany’s”We are Church”coalition, an international Catholic reform movement. Over three months last year, the group gathered almost 2 million signatures for a petition demanding widespread reforms by the Vatican.

Officially, the pope’s mission is to beatify two Catholic priests who were persecuted by the Nazis. The Rev. Bernhard Lichtenberg, provost of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin, was arrested in 1941 for speaking out against the Nazis’ treatment of Jews. He died two years later while being transported to the Dachau concentration camp. The Rev. Karl Leisner, also an opponent of the Nazis, perished in August 1945 as a result of his five-year internment in concentration camps. He had been sent to Dachau as a deacon and was ordained there by a French bishop.

But the papal visit also is seen as a bid by the Vatican to strengthen ranks and send a message to German Catholics that it is concerned with developments within the German church, still one of Europe’s largest and most prosperous.”The pope wants to visit Berlin to beatify these two German priests and celebrate the return of democracy and religious freedom in all of Germany,”said Andreas Herzig, a spokesman for Berlin’s archdiocese.”But he also wants to give strength and encouragement to Catholics in the country.”(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

The Catholic Church has been losing an average 150,000 members a year in all of Germany since the early 1990s, a number that has doubled in the past decade. Almost 10,000 priests have left their orders since the 1960s while regular Mass attendance has sunk to 10 percent of the country’s 28 million officially registered Catholics.

Pastoral assistants from neighboring Poland are being sent in to help in a country where one in five parishes no longer has a priest. In 1995, Germany counted just under 300 candidates who were studying for the priesthood, down from 860 seminarians 10 years earlier.

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Germany’s mass exodus and poor attendance among Catholics result from trends common to other Western industrialized countries: disinterest in organized religion and opposition to the Vatican’s stance on issues of sexual morality, priestly celibacy and female ordination.

But in Germany, many Catholics also are increasingly hostile to what they view as the overly close relationship between the government and the Catholic hierarchy. This phenomenon traces its history to the 19th century, when the intertwining of church and state was particularly flagrant in Germany. Among other policies, the state implemented a special tax to ensure a stable source of funding for Christian churches.

Nowadays, it is precisely the state-administered church tax that many Germans have come to oppose vehemently.

The government levies an extra tax on the income of all baptized Christians and then passes on that amount to the individual’s denomination.

To opt out of the tax scheme, baptized Catholics and Protestants must officially de-register from their church. In the case of Catholics, they also forfeit all rights to receive sacraments such as marriage and anointing the sick (once called extreme unction).

Additionally, the overall increase of taxes since 1990 to pay for German unification and the country’s continued economic problems has caused many Catholics to re-evaluate their religious and financial commitment to the church.”It’s both a financial issue and a question of principle for many people who de-register,”says Norbert Kunz, spokesman for Germany’s Humanistischer Verband, an organization promoting humanist ideals.”Some people don’t want to pay church tax anymore because they can’t afford to. Others simply don’t believe that it’s the state’s business to get involved in issues of personal spirituality and church funding.”(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

Herzig says there are no plans to change church financing, but an effort is being made to better inform the public of the advantages of the present system.”The church runs many social services and community projects very inexpensively,”says Herzig.”If there were no public financing, the state would have to take over these services and taxes would go up.” Depending on the region, German bishops will sometimes have either part or all of their salaries and pensions paid by the state.

The German state also funnels general tax funds back to the church by financing church renovation projects, subsidizing religious schools, paying for military chaplains and collaborating with the church on social projects.

In a country with a strong post-war tradition of pacifism and a high percentage of conscientious objectors who refuse to do military service, many Catholics don’t want their taxes supporting military chaplaincies, Weisner says. They also prefer more autonomy from the state to express their opposition to certain laws, such as the government’s recent tightening of asylum eligibility, he says.”In addition to a general displeasure about the Vatican’s ecclesiastical teachings, many Germans want nothing less than a proper separation between church and state,”Weisner says.”Catholics want to regain full control of their communities and not be subject to undemocratic decision-making processes of the church and the policies of whichever government happens to be in power.”(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Herzig says the German Catholic Church acknowledges the demands for reforms and that the views of dissenting Catholics will be presented to the pope during his visit. But he adds that the church feels certain traditions are so essential that they should be maintained. Those include priestly celibacy and an all-male priesthood, among others.

The church is not worried about potential outbreaks of serious conflict during John Paul’s visit, Herzig adds. The activities of opposition and reform groups, he says, are”a perfectly normal development.” (STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS)

In eastern Germany, the Catholic Church faces special challenges.

Many residents of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) remain atheist, in part as a result of the erosion of Christian communities after 45 years of socialist rule and the discriminatory laws enacted against practicing Christians. While most of the former GDR is Protestant in origin, only 25 percent of the population declares any sort of religious affiliation, of which only 4 percent-600,000 people-are Catholic.

While the Catholic Church has witnessed a revival in other former socialist countries, it is having great difficulty maintaining those few parishes that survived the GDR era.

Herzig acknowledges that many Catholic churches have lower attendance rates than during the GDR era. But he sees this as a result of young Catholics feeling less culturally isolated and less attached to their communities. They are not necessarily less religious, he says. They only have more freedom to move to other regions where they can exercise their religion in a different environment.

Still, says Josef Goebel of Aktions Kreis Halle, a Catholic reform group in eastern Germany,”I have many priest friends who tell me that they have less people coming to church than before”reunification.

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