Catholic Church in Germany

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Catholic Church in Germany is organized nationally through the German Bishops' Conference, the Deutsche Bischofskonferenz, whose own institutional history traces back to the first joint assembly of German bishops at Wurzburg in 1848, a gathering held amid the revolutionary upheavals sweeping Europe that year. It took lasting form nineteen years later as the Fulda Bishops' Conference in 1867, meeting each autumn beside the tomb of Saint Boniface, the eighth century missionary bishop remembered as the apostle to the Germans, a deliberate choice of meeting place linking the modern conference to the earliest roots of German Catholicism itself.

The conference adopted its present name and statutes in 1966, in the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council, formalizing under a new constitution the same national body of German dioceses that had been meeting continuously, in one form or another, for well over a century by that point, a continuity of national organization few other European bishops' conferences can claim across so many changes of German state and constitution.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Under Germany's church tax system, a legal arrangement dating to the Weimar Constitution and carried into the postwar Basic Law, registered Catholics have a portion of their income tax remitted to their diocese by the state tax administration itself, rather than relying on voluntary collections or a separate church run billing system the way most of the worldwide Catholic Church does. That arrangement gives the Catholic Church in Germany a funding base distinct from, and considerably more predictable than, the collection plate model familiar elsewhere in the Church.

The Catholic Church in Germany remains active today under that same system, organized nationally through the German Bishops' Conference and drawing a funding base from the state administered tax that has now persisted, with only the interruption of the Nazi period and its aftermath, across a full century of German constitutional history from the Weimar Republic through to the present Federal Republic. The Evangelical Church in Germany, the country's other major Christian body, draws on the identical state administered mechanism for its own Protestant congregations, so the two largest churches in Germany share a single funding structure that neither had to invent independently and that both continue to rely on today rather than any locally organized alternative.