GERMANY

New Zealand Tablet, 11 January 1912, Page 47

GERMANY

_;~_ INCREASE OF CATHOLICS. Some surprise and much regret (says the London Globe) will be expressed among Protestant religious circles at the pronounced decline of the Lutheran Church in Germany. The statistics published by the census officials leave no doubt whatever on the subject, so heavy a fall is there in the membership of the official Prussian Church; and it is noteworthy that what the Lutheran Church has lost the Roman Catholic Church has gained. It would be a strange thing if a new counter-Reformation were to change twentieth-century Prussia into a Catholic country. For some years past Protestantism has also been declining in Holland, Che most typical Protestant country in Europe. Here, again, the old Calvinism is giving way in many places to Catholicism. We need not comment on the change further than to say that it disproves the idea which was prevalent at one time, that those who left the Protestant Churches relapsed into indifference and abjured all forms of religion. On the contrary, they seem to return to the older creed.