GERMANY
IHT Rendezvous
By ALAN COWELL
BERLIN — Matters of faith have been much on German minds in recent times with debate raging among its Muslim and Jewish minorities over a court’s challenge to the practice of infant circumcision and, as I wrote in my latest Page Two column, over the country’s response to the contentious, American-made video denigrating the Prophet Muhammad that has stirred anger across the Muslim world.
But, in a development that has made fewer international headlines, many of Germany’s Roman Catholics are becoming increasingly incensed by an effort endorsed by the Vatican to ensure that churchgoers continue to pay a mandatory tax.
The decades-old church tax, as it is known, earns the country’s Protestant and Catholic churches a total of some €9 billion a year. Germans can avoid paying the levy – up to 9 percent of their assessed income tax — if they formally leave the church.
As of Monday, Germany’s Roman Catholic Bishops have decreed, those who leave the church may no longer qualify for religious ceremonies such as a Christian burial and may not partake in confession or communion; become a godfather at baptism or confirmation; or hold office within the church. But it will now be open to them to discuss a return to the fold with their priests.
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