31 July 2011
Berlin (AP)

The number of people leaving the Roman Catholic Church in Germany jumped by nearly 50 percent in 2010 as an abuse scandal widened, new data showed Friday.

Some 181,000 people quit their memberships last year, up from 124,000 in 2009, official numbers released by Germany's Roman Catholic Church showed.

Over the past twenty years, the number of members of Germany's Roman Catholic Church has fallen from 28.3 million to 24.6 million or 30.2 percent of the country's population in 2010, the data showed.

The diocese that recorded the highest member loss last year was Munich and Freising — the pope's former diocese, which had been hard-hit by the abuse scandal — where 21,600 people alone left the church.

The overall number of German faithful in 2010 fell by a total of 258,000 as deaths and people turning away from the church heavily outnumbered baptisms, which reached a record low of 170,000.