Posted on 09/28/2012 1:42:44 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
The road to heaven is paved with more than good intentions for Germany's 24m Catholics. If they don't pay their religious taxes, they will be denied sacraments, including weddings, baptisms and funerals.
A decree issued last week by the country's bishops cast a spotlight on the longstanding practice in Germany and a handful of other European countries in which governments tax registered believers and then hand over the money to the religious institutions.
In Germany, the surcharge for Catholics, Protestants and Jews is up to 9pc on their income tax bills - or about €56 (£45) a month for a single person earning a pre-tax monthly salary of about €3,500, AP reported.
For religious institutions, struggling to maintain their congregations in a secular society where the Protestant Reformation began 500 years ago, the tax revenues are vital.
The Catholic Church in Germany receives about €5bn annually from the surcharge. For Protestants, the total is just above €4bn. Donations, in turn, represent a far smaller share of the churches' income than in the US.
With rising prices and economic uncertainty, however, more and more Catholics and Protestants are opting to save their money and declare to tax authorities they are no longer church members, even if they still consider themselves believers.
"I quit the church already in 2007," Manfred Gonschor, a Munich-based IT-consultant, said. "It was when I got a bonus payment and realized that I could have paid myself a nice holiday alone on the amount of church tax that I was paying on it."
Gonschor added he was also "really fed up with the institution and its failures".
Such defections have hit the Catholic Church especially hard — it has lost about 181,000 tax-paying members in 2010 and 126,000 a year later, according to official
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
If you formally declare that you are not a Catholic and therefore are exempt from church tax, you should not expect that the Church you publicly renounced will recognize you as a member.
It’s the money. Pay the tax or else. That’s what the German court ruled for the fellow who wanted to remain a Catholic and not pay the tax. But no..The catch 22 is renounce your membership and be cut off from the church or pay the tax under duress.
What are the churches afraid of? That the membership won’t support them without tithes and taxes?
Evidently a fair number of Germans are deciding that the membership is not worth keeping.
But because of reliance on the uncomprehending and/or hostile secular press --- BBC and Reuters, for instance --- a whole lot of people are missing the point.
The whole debate got sparked by a lawyer trying to be removed from the tax register only but remain Catholic. The Bundesverwaltungsgericht ruled that's not possible. This is a link to that: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jSlD9TmctC-Jm-tR901L0ARw4WLw?docId=CNG.f4d4fec426309741ec996fb87c31f219.1101
So this is not something the bishops made up, it's something they are forced to do by German law.
It’s not about "pay to pray." Being an American citizen and Catholic, but not paying the Kirchensteuer since I'm not a German citizen, I can still receive Communion attending a Mass in Germany, or receive any Sacrament.
People who formally renounce their membership of the Catholic Church are no longer members, and formal defection is something a person can choose --- this is not Islam!
The conditions for a formal defection are described in detail the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts and may be read on its website. Note the following paragraph:
“The substance of the act of the will must be the rupture of those bonds of communion – faith, sacraments, and pastoral governance – that permit the Faithful to receive the life of grace within the Church. This means that the formal act of defection must have more than a juridical-administrative character (the removal of one’s name from a Church membership registry maintained by the government in order to produce certain civil consequences), but be configured as a true separation from the constitutive elements of the life of the Church: it supposes, therefore, an act of apostasy, heresy or schism.”
There it is, read with your own eyes: the removal of one's name from a tax register simply to avoid paying the religious tax is explicitly mentioned as not being sufficient for formal defection from the Catholic faith.
So, are the German bishops denying baptized Catholics the sacraments because they do not pay the tax? No. They can be denied he sacraments only for renouncing the faith. One must have the intention of rupturing one's communion with the Church by an act of apostasy, heresy or schism. This would have to be verified in each individual case.
In order to avoid the tax in Germany, you need to go to the church you belong to and ask to be removed from membership. You have to actually and personally renounce membership in the Catholic Church.
The Church must accept your announced withdrawal from the Sacramental life of the Church, and the German government will reward you for doing so. What could be clearer than that?
Anyone with an actual interest in this --- apart from aiding and abetting the secular media’s distortions --- should google Jimmy Akin, Sentire Cum Ecclesia, Ars Vivendi, the German Bishops Conference, or the comments of Dr Edward Peters.
Then perhaps this statement from the bishop's decree is misunderstood:
“Whoever declares their withdrawal for whatever reason before the responsible civil authritoy always violates their duty to preserve a link with the church, as well as their duty to make a financial contribution so the church can fulfill its tasks.” (Catholic News Service)
What does “withdrawal for whatever reason before the responsible civil authritoy....” mean?
It means for the tax purposes filling out a form for the state.
“There it is, read with your own eyes: the removal of one’s name from a tax register simply to avoid paying the religious tax is explicitly mentioned as not being sufficient for formal defection from the Catholic faith.
Then the bishops must be in error in their statements. Or the actual practice doesn't match the above. OR the term, “formal defection” means something other than “withdrawal”
I'm bugged when people just read BBC or Reuters and never go further into the real story. It's like running with the New York Times' Paul Krugman's comments on the Tea Party.
There could be fault within any or all the parties involved in this Church Tax controversy (church or state, German or Roman) but I will not rush to judgment before I hear from somebody who actually knows.
The most reliable people aren't necesarily Catholic clergy. I look to honest, knowledgeable lay people whose jobs are not tied to some clerical bureaucracy like the USCCB
Phil Lawler and Jeff Mirus (Catholic World News), John Allen (despite his affiliation with the ugh-NCR, he's one of the best); Ed Peters on Canon Law.
sorry
this is another form of what the Roman Catholic Church was built on and most often seeks - tie-ins between the state and the church
as you so well described, it may in fact be a “debt” than can NEVER be repaid in full
which is another way of saying the “meager amounts” (9% of some individuals tax bill??) should be paid forever???
again, justifying to the Roman Catholic Church the perpetual “marriage bed” it loves to share with the state
think again just how all those properties were originally acquired over the centuries - mostly granted title by rulers (the state) in the first place
and anything the state gives it is, by it’s very nature, entitled to take back as it’s whims dictate, no?
“It’s not exactly a “permanent church-state government subsidy” when 100% of the Catholic funds come from Catholic church members. It’s Catholic funds to Catholic churches. Nobody “has” to pay if they don’t want to.”
semantics
in one way, your way, the state is only collecting “tithes” for the Church
looked at as a matter of law, it is a tax-supported subsidy, because without the state, the church would have to collect those tithes on it’s own
now it’s complainging that some people want to “go to church” but at tax-time not admit that they “go to church”
but, all churches have this issue - many go to church, but most of the tithing and contributions come from a core of those who go to church
but, true to it’s history, the Roman Catholic Church is content with a third way - get the state to collect “church taxes” for it - a practice abanonded in the U.S. in the 1800s; but a practice I would bet the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. would be the first to sign up for if it thought any U.S. Congress and the U.S. courts would support it
What I'm looking at, though, is he way it developed historically. Sometimes it was a tremendous culture-creating partnership, for instance the Carolingian endowment of monastic and cathedral schools (heck, monks could read and write: who else would staff your schools?) Sometimes --- like after the repeated 19th century attempts to annihilate Church-related institutions--- it was a forced march into the only survival accommodation offered (Kirchensteuer).
I would be happy if the Geman state got totally out of the Church's finances. I think Ratzinger foresaw this as far back as 1969.
In any event it appears the German bishops are indeed treating withdrawals to avoid the tax as though they are formal defections. They claim Vatican support.
“The most reliable people aren't necesarily Catholic clergy. I look to honest, knowledgeable lay people whose jobs are not tied to some clerical bureaucracy like the USCCB”
But those honest, knowledgeable lay people don't make the rules.
It will be interesting to see how the civil law works out since it will affect all formally recognized groups.
It will indeed be 'interesting' to see how it works out. As in the Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."
One trillion Euros!
Hope Obama doesn’t get any ideas from the Germans.
It will indeed be 'interesting' to see how it works out. As in the Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."
“a practice I would bet the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. would be the first to sign up for if it thought any U.S. Congress and the U.S. courts would support it.”
Hope the American Bishops are not reading this! They would find a way to do away with the onerous “Bishop’s Diocesan Appeals” throughout the country. They would no longer have to send out weekly mailings or preach untold strong-arm sermons to extort from the people what the Bishops do not need in the first place.
Of Peters, Lawler, Allen I'm familiar, Lawler the most. All worth reading to be sure.
Carr was a basic Catholic-Socialist: Preferential Option for Growing Government, never saw a human problem that didn't have a taxpayer-funded solution.
He's out.
Reyes is a Christendom College guy, a Chaput protege and a social conservative. He's in.
This is worth keeping an eye on, and a quiet sigh of hope.
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