Parishioners in the Düsseldorf Parish of St Margareta have written to their archbishop explaining to him that they would prefer if he did not turn up to celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation later this month.
In their letter to the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, 140 parishioners explained that for them he was no longer credible and that they had lost their trust in him as their bishop.
Last year Woelki was criticised for suppressing a report he himself commissioned into clerical sexual abuse.
The German Catholic Church is haemorrhaging. In 2019, 218,000 people left the church, twice the number as decade earlier.
According to census figures the Catholic population in Germany today is 22.6 million, in 2001 there were 26 million Catholics in the country.
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And to add to Woelki's woes, on May 28th the Vatican announced an Apostolic Visitation to the Cologne Archdiocese.
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