* Top court agrees tax opt-outs can’t stay in church
* Ruling upholds multi-billion euro tax system
By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor
PARIS, Sept 26 (Reuters) – Germany’s top administrative
court agreed with Roman Catholic bishops on Wednesday that
German believers who refuse to pay a special church tax could be
shut out of Catholic worship.
The verdict, based on German corporate law, upheld the
system by which the state collects religious taxes from
registered Catholics, Protestants and Jews with their monthly
returns and distributes them to the religious communities.
Reformist Catholics have decried the tax, introduced in the
19th century to compensate for confiscated church properties, as
a “pay to pray” system. Conservative critics have asked why tax
opt-outs are shut out but dissenting theologians are not.
“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 in
Leipzig, the top appeals court in such issues.
The Church hailed the verdict as confirmation of its tax
rule, which the bishops reconfirmed last week with a decree
saying members who opted out of the tax could not receive
sacraments, work in the Church or have a religious burial.
“The Church is a community of faith that exists in Germany
in the form of a statutory corporation – they cannot be
separated,” Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, head of the bishops’
conference, said after the verdict was announced.
The legal challenge to the tax began in 2007 when a retired
professor of canon law told his local tax authority that he
wanted to quit the institutional Catholic Church and stop paying
its tax, but continue to practise the religion.
If the Leipzig court had ruled against the Church, it could
have prompted a wave of departures from the religions that
charge the tax, which amounts to 8 or 9 percent of earnings.
FULL COFFERS
Church taxes brought in about 5 billion euros ($6.5 billion)
for the Roman Catholic Church and 4.3 billion euros for the
Protestant churches in 2010, according to official statistics.
Those funds have helped both churches to run large networks
of schools, hospitals and charitable works in Germany and
contribute to churches abroad, but an exodus of members has
lowered total revenues in recent years.
The annual total of Catholic church leavers, usually around
120,000, jumped to 181,193 two years ago as news of decades of
sexual abuse of children by priests shamed the hierarchy and
prompted an apology from the German-born Pope Benedict.
Zollitsch defended the tax decree during a meeting of the
Catholic Church hierarchy in Fulda this week.
“Our concern is to show that whoever wants to belong to the
Church must contribute to what the Church needs to do its work,”
he said on Tuesday. “There must be consequences.”
German media have dubbed the new tax decree “excommunication
lite” because it bars those who refuse to pay from almost all
church activities – including becoming godparents or joining a
church-run club – without saying they have been excommunicated.
The Catholic reform movement We Are Church said the tax
decree was questionable under Church law because it had not been
approved by the proper Vatican department.
“The bishops still have to explain theologically and legally
what status these sanctions have,” it said in a statement.
(Editing by Kevin Liffey)
