It’s ironic, isn’t it, that, as The Tablet’s correspondent reports, the German Church’s income from church tax continued to rise in 2021 while at the same time 359,338 Catholics officially left the Church.

It’s ironic, isn’t it, that, as The Tablet’s correspondent reports, the German Church’s income from church tax continued to rise in 2021 while at the same time 359,338 Catholics officially left the Church. Their reasons will be mixed but one consequence is they no longer have to pay the country’s compulsory church tax of between 8 and 9 per cent of their net income tax. The statistics published by the bishops’ conference show that €6.73 billion (£5.68bn) was received – the second highest sum on record, achieved largely from property investments.

Is there anything more dispiriting than a Church which is shedding the faithful but increasing in wealth? But that’s what the church tax makes possible. I write, obviously, as an outsider and indeed an admirer of the German Catholic tradition. I am indebted to Professor Claus Arnold who has written to this paper to point out that opting out of the tax involves making a formal declaration of apostasy at a registry office; in laxer parts of the Church people lapse quietly. He says that many priests do not in fact follow the implications, by denying apostates the sacraments. I had heard of a man denied the last rites – presumably repenting of the apostasy – because he had left the Church; if true, that was the loss of a soul for money. And if apostates’ children are, even in some cases, refused baptism, that too amounts to the denial of grace.

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