The number of people formally leaving the Catholic Church in Switzerland almost doubled in 2023, setting a new record, according to new statistics issued Thursday.
The Swiss Institute for Pastoral Sociology (SPI) in St. Gallen said Nov. 14 that 67,497 people left the Church last year, far exceeding the previous annual record of 34,561 set in 2022.
“Across Switzerland as a whole, the average departure rate is 2.6%,” it said.
The SPI estimated that, at the end of 2023, there were around 2.8 million Swiss Catholics out of a population of 8.7 million.
The SPI said the near-doubling of the “church exit” figure was due to the abuse crisis that engulfed the Swiss Church in September 2023, when the Vatican ordered a probe into allegations against six members of the country’s bishops’ conference.
The news broke just days before the publication of an independent pilot study on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Switzerland since the mid-20th century. The study identified 1,002 “situations of sexual abuse,” involving 510 suspected perpetrators and 921 victims.
The SPI noted sharp variations in “church exit” rates among Switzerland’s 26 cantons.
The cantons with the highest departure rates were Basel-Stadt (4.5%), Aargau (4.6%), and Solothurn (4.6%), in northern Switzerland, near the country’s border with Germany.
In contrast, the cantons of Geneva, Valais, Neuchâtel, and Vaud, in western Switzerland, recorded almost no departures. The SPI said this was because the four cantons have a different structure in which membership is not linked to the payment of a church tax.
The institute said that if the four cantons were excluded from the statistics, the average departure rate would be 3.1%, compared to 1.6% in 2022.
In cantons that levy a church tax, Catholics can only avoid paying by submitting a written request to their home parish asking to leave the Church. Church tax rates vary significantly across the country.
The SPI said 1,004 people joined the Catholic Church in 2023, down slightly from 1,080 in 2022.
“The ratio between entries and exits is therefore approximately 1:77,” it noted.
There were 15,142 Catholic baptisms and 2,234 church weddings in Switzerland in 2023, reported the Swiss Church website kath.ch.
The website quoted Bishop Markus Büchel, who has led the Diocese of St. Gallen since 2006, as saying: “We are doing what we can to improve what has been done wrong. We want to be open to giving the faithful what they expect from the Church.”
Urs Brosi, the general secretary of the Roman Catholic Central Conference of Switzerland (RKZ), an organization that brings together Switzerland’s 24 Catholic cantonal churches, said: “Given the enormous social changes in Western Europe in terms of secularization and individualization, this development cannot simply be stopped.”
The SPI noted that the number of volunteers in the Diocese of St. Gallen and altar servers in German-speaking Switzerland remained relatively stable, despite the rise in church exits.
The SPI also observed that Switzerland’s neighbors, Austria and Germany, had seen an exodus of Catholics amid ongoing abuse crises.
The departure rate in Germany was 1.9% in 2023, down from 2.4% in 2022. In Austria, the SPI said, the rate was 1.8% in 2023, slightly lower than the 1.9% rate in 2022,
The Swiss bishops’ conference announced on Sept. 10, 2023, that the Vatican had asked the Diocese of Chur’s Bishop Joseph Bonnemain to undertake a preliminary canonical investigation into claims against several retired and active conference members.
In February, the Chur diocese said that Bonnemain had completed the probe into allegations against members of the Swiss bishops’ conference and other clergy, with the help of the Zurich criminal law professor Brigitte Tag and Neuchâtel chief judge Pierre Cornu.
Bonnemain personally delivered a 24-page final report, drawing on 1,800 pages of documentation, to Vatican officials.
“The files are now being studied in the Vatican, which could take some time,” the diocese said. “Officials in the Roman Curia will then draw their conclusions, make decisions, and appropriately communicate them.”
The Protestant Church in Switzerland (PCS) also saw a record number of departures in 2023, the SPI said. Last year, 39,517 people formally left the federation, up from 30,393 in 2022.
At the end of 2023, the PCS had around 1.86 million members, almost a million fewer than the Catholic Church.
