No religious tax, no burial say bishops as RC church gets tough

GERMANY’S Catholic Church – reeling from an exodus of members – will deny people the right to a Christian burial and baptisms if people do not pay a tax demanded by the state to belong to a recognised religion.

A German bishops’ decree which has just come into force says anyone failing to pay the tax – an extra 8 per cent on their income tax bill – will no longer be considered a Catholic.

Last year millions of files spanning decades were handed over to criminal investigators by all 27 dioceses of the Catholic Church hierarchy in Germany in an attempt to get to the heart of child sex abuse by priests. The move was seen as an attempt to staunch the flow of people leaving the church who made it plain that the scandal was the reason for their departure.

All Germans who are officially registered as Catholics, Protestants or Jews pay a religious tax of 8 per cent to 9 per cent on their annual income tax bill. The levy was introduced in the 19th century by way of compensation for the nationalisation of religious property.

In 2010, 181,000 people left Germany’s Roman Catholic Church, an increase of 50 per cent on the previous year. Last year 126,000 left. Over the past 20 years, the membership has fallen from 28.3 million to 24.6 million, about 30.2 per cent of the country’s population.

Now comes the new hardline stance from the church, which is also partly in response to a test case due for a decision by a court in Leipzig on Friday. The case concerns Professor Hartmut Zapp, who announced in 2007 that he would no longer pay the tax but intended to remain within the Catholic faith. In a decision endorsed by the Vatican, the German Bishops’ Conference declared this week: “This decree makes clear that one cannot partly leave the Church.”

Couples can receive an exemption to be married in the church, as long as they pledge to maintain their faith and raise their children as Catholics. But the powers that be can deny church tax dodgers a Catholic burial “if the person who has left the church has not shown any sign of remorse before death”.

Though the bishops’ text avoids the word “excommunication”, the consequences of the all-or-nothing rule are essentially one and the same.

Unless they pay the religious tax, Catholics will not be allowed to receive sacraments, except before death, or work in the church and its schools or hospitals.

“Without a sign of repentance before death, a religious burial can be refused,” the decree states. Opting out of the tax would also bar people from acting as godparents to Catholic children.

It is understood that German-born Pope Benedict XVI helped formulate the policy after his visit to Germany last year did little to prompt a mass return to the fold.

The Pope’s former diocese of Munich and Freising saw the highest loss of members in 2010, with 21,600 leaving the church.

The Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, begged forgiveness for “everything those working for the church have done” as he presented a report that showed more than 250 priests and religion teachers sexually or physically abused children in the diocese over the past decades.