German Catholics Ordered To Either Pay ‘Religion Tax’ Or Leave The Church

Germany’s Roman Catholic population must pay a special ‘religion tax’ of around 8-9 percent of their annual income tax bill or risk being excommunicated from the church, reported Deutsche Welle on Wednesday, after a German court sided with the nation’s bishops in a bitter defeat for grass-roots Catholics and conservative church campaigners.

Germany’s Roman Catholic population must pay a special ‘religion tax’ of around 8-9 percent of their annual income tax bill or risk being excommunicated from the church, reported Deutsche Welle on Wednesday, after a German court sided with the nation’s bishops in a bitter defeat for grass-roots Catholics and conservative church campaigners.

According to the report, any Catholic who now refuses to pay the tax will be barred from receiving religious services, including the rite of Communion or having a religious burial once he/she passes away.

This was due to an existing law from 1803, which levied a tax on Catholics, Protestants and Jews in compensation for the nationalisation of religious property. In 2011 for instance, the Catholic Church received 5 billion euros ($6.4 billion) and the Protestant Church 4.5 billion euros from taxpayers, each adding up to the bulk of the churches’ income, reported the BBC.

The law was challenged in 2007 when Harmut Zapp, a retired German theologian, declared at his local civil register office that he wanted to remain a member of the Catholic faith, but wished to no longer pay the church tax.

Zapp, like many other reformist Catholics who have spoken up against the tax, believed that membership in the Church should be determined by a person’s beliefs and not by a financial relationship.

But the Leipzig Federal Administrative Court and the Catholic Church in Germany disagreed, arguing that, as the church is registered as a statutory corporation in the country, paying the tax would be a fundamental determinant of an individual’s membership in the church.  

“Whoever wants to officially leave a religious community that is registered as a statutory corporation cannot limit this withdrawal to the statutory corporation and remain a member of the faith community,” said the Federal Administrative Court, Germany’s top appeals court, in a statement cited by Reuters.

[quote]”The Church is a community of faith that exists in Germany in the form of a statutory corporation – they cannot be separated,” added Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, head of the Germany’s bishops’ conference.[/quote]

Catholics make up around 30 percent of Germany’s population; though the faith has seen a mass exodus in recent years following revelations of sexual abuse by German priests. 181,193 registered Catholics left the church in 2010, in the immediate aftermath of the scandal, while the average annual total of Catholic church leavers is around 120,000.

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The Catholic reform group, We Are Church, told Reuters that the tax decree was questionable under Church law, as it had not been approved by the Vatican Church in Rome. The German Catholic Church also carefully avoided describing the measures as a “full excommunication” as the Vatican had ruled in 2006 that the penalty could not be imposed merely because someone had declared to a tax office that they were leaving the Church. The measures, as We Are Church points out though, can be considered to be tantamount to an excommunication.

[quote]“This decree at this moment of time is really the wrong signal by the German bishops who know that the Catholic Church is in a deep crisis,” told Christian Weisner from We Are Church, to the BBC.[/quote]

“The formulation that you have to do without a Church burial is really an irreconcilability beyond death,” We Are Church spokeswoman Sigrid Grabmeier said.

[quote]“The church is squandering an incredible number of opportunities to reach out to people and to be there when they face adversity…The bishops still have to explain theologically and legally what status these sanctions have,” she added.[/quote]

Father Lukas Glocker, a German priest from Mannheim, in south-western Germany, however tried to reassure the Catholic community that the tax would be used for good works.

“With kindergarten, with homes for elderly or unemployed, we’ve got really good things so I know we need the tax to help the German country to do good things,” Father Glocker said.

[quote]”Our concern is to show that whoever wants to belong to the Church must contribute to what the Church needs to do its work,” added Archbishop Zollitsch. “There must be consequences.”[/quote]