FAQ
Frequently asked questions
(Please keep them coming!)
What exactly does a concordat mean for a nation?
It's a commitment to give the Church certain legal and financial privileges forever, unless the Church agrees to relinquish them. You can change a law if enough representatives vote to do so, but you cannot change a concordat without agreement from the Vatican, because it is classed as an international treaty. Once in place, therefore, concordats are removed from democratic control.
What are concordats?
They are treaties between a national government and the Holy See. (They are not made in the name of the territory known officially as the "State of the Vatican City" and informally as the "Vatican City".).
The Holy See is both the government of the Roman Catholic Church and of the Vatican City. This arm’s length relationship keeps concordats in force even if the Church were to lose its territorial base, (as it once did).
What do they do?
They give privileges to the Church that it would not likely get in the first place, and once in force, not likely keep, if it had to rely on democratic means like national laws or constitutions.
What sorts of privileges?
Two kinds: money and power.
Concordat money can be given, for example, as direct subsidies to the Church, for the wages of the clergy, for the maintenance of church buildings, as tax exemption and for Church-run schools, hospitals and other social services. It's all about calling the tune without paying the piper.
Concordat privileges which confer power in society can take forms like compulsory religious instruction in state schools, and the permission to discriminate against the employees of Church-run (but state-subsidised) social services. The social effects can be pervasive, especially in times of high unemployment or where the Church-run service may be the only one in town. Money can be translated into power and vice versa. An example: the state subsidises Church-run care homes where nuns advise the dying to leave money to the home. This was such a problem in Germany that it was forbidden, which only means that now patients are encouraged to leave money, not to the care home itself, but to some other Church institution.
What powers are conferred on the Vatican and what liberties do citizens of concordat nations sacrifice, if any?
It varies from country to country, because concordats demand whatever the Vatican thinks the market will bear. Current concordats in countries like Poland and the Dominican Republic forbid anyone married in a Catholic Church to ever sue for a civil divorce. The Polish concordat phrases it with great delicacy (1993, Article 10.2), calling for the state to put in place the enabling legislation which would enforce "concordat marriage". But the Dominican one (1954, Article 15.2) is franker: "by virtue of contracting Catholic marriage, spouses renounce the possibility of divorce, which shall not be applicable to these Canon marriages". Here we see how a concordat can deny some citizens their rights under civil law in a direct fashion.
Generally, however, this is done in a more roundabout way. The concordat grants taxpayers’ money to Catholic social services (for example in Germany Catholic hospitals are funded to 98.2% by the state) yet it also stipulates that Church institutions are to be run according to Canon (Church) Law, and not civil law. This means that if you work at a Catholic school, hospital, care home, etc., you can be fired for changing your religion, being gay, living with a partner, or even remarrying. Thus you can be denied your rights under civil law indirectly, that is, if you want to retain your job.
Furthermore, with such generous state subsidies there are many places in, for example, Germany, where Catholic social services are the major or even sole employer in some field. This can result in people feeling they must go to church and even force their families to attend, in order to have a chance to get a job. It’s this unofficial erosion of liberty which is the most worrying thing. No concordat is going to come right out and say: “You must give money to the Church if you want to make sure that someday your handicapped child gets a place in a Church-run (yet state-subsidised) sheltered workshop.” But the concordat sets things up so that this can happen.
What languages are concordats written in?
Each is generally written in two languages. One copy is in Italian, the working language of the Vatican, and the other is in the language of the country concerned.
Are concordats confined to the Catholic Church?
No longer. Other religious groups naturally demand similar consideration, even if they do not call these agreements “concordats”. For instance, Germany has such “treaties” with both the Lutheran Church and the Jewish Central Committee, even though they possess no territory. Both Georgia and Belarus have concordats with the Orthodox Church. And Hungary has similar "agreements" with the Reformed (Calvinist), Lutheran, Baptist, and Serb Orthodox Churches, as well as the Alliance of Jewish Communities.
Are concordats necessary to guarantee "religious freedom"?
No. Non-countries include such bastions of religious freedom as the Netherlands. And concordat countries happen to include all the Fascist countries of the 1920s to the 1940s. This any correlation between concordats and religious freedom is likely to be a negative one.
There are three ways to guarantee religious freedom, none of which involve concordats: through domestic legislation, through a country’s constitution and through its agreements with international bodies like the United Nations and the European Union. To ensure "religious freedom", therefore, concordats with the Holy See are unnecessary and, if we look at history, even counterproductive.
What does Concordat Watch stand for?
Separation of church and state. Period. This separation does not, of itself, ensure human rights, but it is needed in order to make them possible. More on this here.
