No more state money for churches? Now the plan for the traffic light is faltering

There are those issues on which the traffic light parties are in complete agreement. They want to put an end to the fact that millions of euros are paid to the churches every year from the state budgets of 14 federal states - Hamburg and Bremen are not included. "We are creating," it says in an indisputable passage of the coalition agreement, "in a basic law in dialogue with the federal states and the churches, a fair framework for the replacement of state services."

But here the dialogue with the countries is now threatening to fail. They are unwilling to support the federal government's previous plans to end those payments. "All 14 affected federal states agree that there is no blessing in the current plans to replace state services," said the head of the Lower Saxony State Chancellery, Jörg Mielke, WELT. Lower Saxony is currently chairing the Prime Ministers' Conference, and Prime Minister Stephan Weil explained their position on the subject in a telephone call this week to Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (both SPD).

Government benefits are not the membership fees of Catholics or Protestants in the form of their church taxes. It is also not the benefit reimbursements that municipalities or social security funds pay to church day-care centers or hospitals and nursing homes. Rather, it is about additional annual payments from the general state budgets and thus tax money of all citizens on the basis of centuries-old contractual relationships. They have - repeatedly renewed and financially dynamized - led to a total of 602 million euros flowing from the federal states to the Catholic dioceses and Protestant regional churches in 2022.

Year after year it becomes more. The regional differences are large. At the top is Baden-Württemberg, which paid 137 million euros last year, followed by Bavaria with 103 million. In Saarland it is the least: 840,000 euros.

In the Catholic area, the payments go back to the Napoleonic wars. When all German territories west of the Rhine were to be ceded to France, from 1803 the affected princes in the old German Empire were allowed to appropriate church property as compensation - and had to give the church money to pay clergymen as compensation. This became a permanent contract.

The Protestants go back to the 16th century. When monasteries were dissolved and bishops deposed after the Reformation, large ecclesiastical estates fell to the sovereigns. They took over the care of many clergymen and the maintenance of church buildings from their own funds. This support was translated into treaties in the 19th century.

Since then, both churches have been entitled to state benefits, the foundations of which have never been questioned, despite numerous revisions. Not even in 1919, when the Weimar Republic was founded. But their constitution stipulated - and this passage was adopted into the Basic Law in 1949 - that the payments were to be terminated, more precisely: "replaced". According to many lawyers, this means that there must be a larger one-off payment before the termination.

According to the Weimar Constitution, the principles for this are decided by the Reich, today the Bund. On this basis, the countries should then clarify the details in their own laws and negotiations with the churches. But in the Weimar Republic there was never a Reich law and in the Federal Republic there was never a federal law for the principles. And therefore no replacement by the countries.

In order to finally fulfill the more than hundred-year-old constitutional mandate, Faeser's Federal Ministry of the Interior invited representatives of the churches and the federal states as well as legal experts to several rounds of talks last winter, in which the highly complicated matter first had to be viewed. Although no resolutions were subsequently passed, some principles were mentioned that the ministry could use as a guide when drafting a basic law.

There was broad agreement in the rounds that municipal special payments and state obligations for the maintenance of individual church buildings should not fall under the state services to be redeemed. Neither are tax breaks.

And as far as the rest of it is concerned, the lawyers and church representatives present agreed in principle that a replacement, if it is made, must be accompanied by a large one-off payment. Nothing concrete has been specified, but one can imagine the following: Firstly, the federal states will transfer a multiple of their respective annual payments to the churches, and secondly, the annual payments will continue for some time at approximately the previous level. And then after a decade or two it would be completely over.

The federal states are also likely to pay off the one-off amount, which could be between 17 and 18 times the annual payment, in installments. But no matter how they would deal with it - they would have a very high additional burden in addition to the annual payments that would continue for some time.

The dimensions of this can be illustrated by the hypothetical example of Rhineland-Palatinate, which paid 66 million euros last year. A one-time redemption payment of 17 times the annual amount would amount to more than 1.1 billion euros.

On the fringes of his visit to Brazil, Economics Minister Habeck spoke about the budget dispute in the federal government. Habeck points out that compliance with the debt brake without tax increases means that the federal government has to save. That would hit all ministries hard.

Source: WORLD

The countries do not want to accept such sums. "A replacement of 17 or 18 times the annual amounts would not be financed even with installment payments," said Mielke from Lower Saxony WELT. "This applies all the more," continued the head of the State Chancellery, "in times of many additional financial obligations of the state budgets."

It is conceivable that the federal states will try to reduce the amount of the one-off payment or completely overturn it with reference to the amounts that have been paid for a very long time. But it is questionable whether this is possible. Because it's about terminating contracts. And the churches, as contractual partners, have a pretty strong legal position. They are in principle ready to be replaced - also because of the massively dwindling understanding of state services in society - but of course they want to get as much money out of it.

And the federal states do not want to haggle with them. Because, according to Mielke: "The states can have no interest in burdening the tried and tested good relationship with the churches with financial discussions." Both denominations made "in many places great things in the social and educational sectors" - "especially with their day-care centers and schools".

In fact, it is precisely this area of ​​education that worries the countries enough. Since they can hardly afford a financial dispute with one of the most important institutions in the preschool sector. Mielke: "The beneficial cooperation between state and church should definitely be preserved."

It is therefore conceivable that the state benefits will continue in the future. Because it would currently be much cheaper for the countries to pay a few tens of millions a year than to raise a large one-off amount that would only save them the annual millions many years later.

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