Vienna, Austria - Significantly fewer Austrians left the Roman Catholic Church in 2006, the Archdiocese of Vienna said Tuesday — a sign that a mass exodus of believers triggered by priest sex scandals and the nation's unpopular church tax is slowing.
Across the overwhelmingly Catholic country, 36,645 people formally withdrew from the church last year, a nearly 18 percent drop from the 44,609 believers who canceled their memberships in 2005, the archdiocese said.
The exodus peaked in 2004, when 45,000 Austrians left a church bedeviled by scandal and a chronic shortage of priests.
Many cited disgust over the discovery of up to 40,000 lurid images at a seminary in St. Poelten, 80 kilometers (50 miles) west of Vienna, including child porn and photos of young candidates for the priesthood fondling each other and their older religious instructors.
Other dropouts expressed discontent with a church tax collected by the government — a levy that averages more than €250 (US$325) per year.
Since 1995, when accusations surfaced that the late Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer molested youths at a monastery in the 1970s, the Austrian church has lost almost half a million members, officials say.
Monsignor Wilfried Kreuth, a cleric tracking the trend in the diocese of St. Poelten, where church departures slowed by more than 27 percent last year, called the shift "new and encouraging."
Underscoring how believers are now bucking the trend, the Vienna archdiocese — one of Europe's largest — said about 4,600 believers who had left the church in recent years re-registered as members in 2006, up from 4,009 in the previous year.
Archdiocese spokesman Erich Leitenberger said a recent survey showing that more than four in 10 of Austria's 8.2 million people attend Mass at least once a month, and another 33 percent pack pews for Christmas, Easter and other major religious holidays, suggests "the constant harping about a church crisis" is overblown.
"Nobody can suppress the three basic long-term questions. ... Where have I come from? Where am I going? And what's the meaning of my life?" he said.
The Roman Catholic Church has gone through trials and tribulations elsewhere in Europe.
In Portugal, for instance, only 38 new priests are due to be ordained in 2007 — four fewer than last year — prompting leaders to organize a spring recruitment campaign.
In Austria, defections were down most dramatically in the Austrian capital, which recorded a 20 percent decline in the numbers of churchgoers who formally filed paperwork to withdraw. It was the lowest number of people to abandon the church since 1983, the archdiocese said.
Pope Benedict XVI is scheduled to visit Austria in September with stops in Vienna and Mariazell, a popular pilgrimage site in the southern province of Styria. His predecessor, the late John Paul II, visited Vienna in 1998 and 1983.