28.01.2021 – 01:00
Cologne city indicator
Cologne (ots)
The Cologne District Court recorded a wave of church resignations on an unprecedented scale. As the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” (Thursday edition) reports, citing information from the authority, the number is currently more than 1000 a month. Normally, the authority offers around 640 dates a month for the exit, said spokesman Maurits Steinebach of the newspaper. In addition to these regular appointments, which were fully booked until the end of March, there have been 100 further appointments per week since January 22nd. These were also fully booked within a few days. Projected over the year, this would correspond to an increase of 70 percent. According to the State Ministry of Justice, 6960 Christians of both denominations left the church in the area of the Cologne District Court district, the largest in North Rhine-Westphalia, in 2020.
In a fire letter to the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Rainer Woelki, a group of 34 Cologne priests complained of a loss of credibility and trust in their pastoral work in view of the conflicts over dealing with the abuse scandal in the archbishopric and a legal opinion that Woelki had sealed. The letter that is available to the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” requires the diocese leadership to assume personal responsibility. The authors, among them the secretary of the Cologne Priestly Council, Jochen Thull, describe Woelki their “increasing inner distancing” from the diocese leadership and speak of an increasing loyalty conflict. The believers also kept their distance from the church. In particular, the work of the youth chaplains is made more difficult because they are “no longer trusted”. The authors of the letter write that they are not ready “to watch this development with quiet resignation” and as a “way out of this need” demand from the diocese leadership a “truthful and transparent handling of their own mistakes” in dealing with abuse as well as the “recognition of structural failure in the past and present “.
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Original content from: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, transmitted by news aktuell
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