Christianity is Rattling: "Lights Out" in Germany

by Giulio Meotti • October 12, 2016 at 5:00 am

The fall of German Christianity leaves an emptiness that seems likely to be filled by a more multicultural and Islamic society. Germany today houses Europe's largest Muslim community.
Christians in Germany, Die Welt reports, will become a minority in 20 years.
The falling birth rate will remove a piece of Germany larger than the former communist East Germany. It will result in a demographic loss equivalent to the population of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne and Frankfurt combined.
The German army just spent 428 million euros on various operations relating to migrants during the past year. It has been the costliest mission within German borders that the army of the Federal Republic of Germany has ever undertaken.
In the decades after WWII, Germans have turned into hard-core pacifists, enjoying their role on the sidelines of global conflicts. The army was then turned into a humanitarian organization.

What was once the Catholic St. Peter's Church in Mönchengladbach, Germany, is now an indoor rock-climbing facility -- one of several known as a "climbing church" (Kletterkirche). Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

"Contemporary historians ... right now, have failed to find a single historical example of a society that became secularised and maintained its birth rate over subsequent centuries," the former UK chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, recently argued.

"Falling fertility has coincided so closely with massive secularization that we must at least ask whether the two phenomena are related, even if not in a neat one-to-one relationship", the scholar Philip Jenkins also said.

This is also true apparently for Germany.

The Ratzinger-Schülerkreis is the circle made up of 41 former alumni of Pope Benedict XVI (born Joseph Ratzinger), who meet once a year with their former professor to discuss a specific topic. This year Pope Benedict has chosen the "spiritual crisis of Europe." The guest of honor was the American jurist Joseph Weiler, who coined the expression "Christophobia" and defended the crucifix in Italian schools at the EU's highest tribunal.