VIENNA, Austria (AP):
MORE THAN 450,000 people have left Austria's scandal-stung Austria's Roman Catholic church over the past decade, church leaders said yesterday.
A total of 457,600 believers have formally withdrawn from church rolls since the end of 1993, according to statistics kept by Austrian dioceses. Church officials said their records now show 5,751,615 Catholics in Austria, 7.3 percent fewer than the 6,209,215 on the rolls in 1993.
Austria's church has been rocked by the discovery of a large cache of child pornography at a seminary. Bishop Kurt Krenn, who oversaw
the diocese where the seminary was located before a Vatican inspector shut it down in August, said
this week he had submitted his
resignation to Pope John Paul II.
CHURCH EXODUS ON THE RISE
Archdiocese of Vienna said last month that applications to formally withdraw from parishes were up 36 per cent in July and shot up another 40 per cent in August. So far this year alone, 10,709 people have left the church as of August 31, the
archdiocese said.
The last significant exodus from the church happened in 1998, when the late Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer was accused of molesting youths at a monastery in the 1970s. Tens of thousands left in the wake
of the allegations, which were
never proven.
In overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Austria, people are automatically registered as church members when they are baptised as infants. To get their names off the rolls, they must formally apply to the government and pay any state church taxes they may owe.
Before the sex scandals hit, unhappiness with the church tax which averages about US$350 a year was a key reason why people left.
