Germany
Only one of the "Fascist concordats" is still substantially in place. Italy has got rid of the Mussolini concordat, Spain has replaced the Franco concordat, Austria has eroded through amendments the Dollfuss concordat and Portugal has scrapped the concordat made with Salazar. Only Germany still retains its concordat with Hitler.
The Pope accepted the resignation of Ausgburg Bishop Walter Mixa on 8 May 2010 after he came under investigation for beating children in an orphanage, embezzling funds from it and sexually abusing a young ministrant. Yet, as a Bishop Emeritus, his pension will now be paid by the public, (just like his monthly wage of €7900), thanks to Art. 10 § 1 (i) of the 1924 Bavarian Concordat.
However, the enormous power of both Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany today is not due solely to the concordats or church-state agreements. The privileges that these pacts give to the churches are amplified by another fateful German innovation. It was the 1919 Constitution of the democratic Weimar Republic which gave the churches wide latitude in substituting their own regulations for the law of the land.
These articles were incorporated into the present German constitution, including Article 140 (which in the Appendix takes over Article 137 § 5 of the Weimar Constitution) confirming the status of the Catholic and Lutheran Churches as corporations under public law. At the same time Article 19 § 5 extends to these artificial persons, the rights of real ones, thus setting the stage for a conflict between individual and group rights. On the second page of the menu below several articles show how this church autonomy lets faith-based social services remove millions of Germans from the protection of many civil laws.
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Concordats | |
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Hitler's concordat (1933) : Text and background |
• Reichskonkordat (with Hitler, 1933): Text with Secret Supplement | |
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Overview of Concordats in Germany |
In this excerpt Prof. Francis Messner looks at Germany, where relations between church and state are regulated by treaties. This means international "concordats" for the Catholic Church, and national "accords" for the other religious groups. In the last hundred years there have been three waves of these. | |
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List of current German Concordats |
In addition to the concordat at the federal level, every German state has some kind of agreement with the Catholic Church. Fourteen have concordats with the Vatican and two have agreements with the local bishops. (This doesn't count the large number of concordats about the establishment of individual dioceses, schools, theological faculties, etc.) The list is linked to the German concordat texts. | |
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Church control over professors through the Bavarian Concordat (1924) |
The concordat with Bavaria gives the Church control over the 21 professors who fill “concordat chairs”, even though they're 85-90% funded by the state. This extends Church influence beyond the teaching of theology to include philosophy, pedagogy and the social sciences. Naturally, women and non-Catholics need not apply. Or even, it turns out, a top Catholic scholar who has criticised the Pope. | |
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Faith-based welfare | |
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An inside look at faith-based social services in Germany |
From birth to death many Germans depend on social services which, while paid for by the taxpayer, are run by the Church. These accounts of ordinary Germans show what it means to live in the shadow of Canon (Church) Law. This code of religious law regulates the institutions where they may have to seek jobs or help, and they must accept any interference in their private lives without complaint, or risk being unemployed. | |
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Under God’s roof |
In Germany the churches themselves determine the labour regulations of their employees. That’s what the Constitution says. Factory committee? Employee participation? The right to strike? No way. | |
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The German principle of “church autonomy” |
German law opts for "church autonomy", rather than "separation of church and state". This has been interpreted by the Constitutional Court to mean that the churches are free to run huge enterprises (at public expense) where the state's employment laws do not apply, and the churches are free to make their own. This can mean that their employees can legally be fired if their personal lives don't conform to the church ethos. | |
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German taxpayers subsidise 98% of faith-based social services |
Dr. Carsten Frerk, an authority on church finances, reveals for the first time in English that social service employees of German religious organisations number almost 2½ million and that the German churches pay for less than 2% of their “good works”, with the taxpayer left to foot the rest of the bill. | |
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Millions for the bishops: Why the German state pays the wages for the church |
How did Germany become the cash cow of the Vatican? An English transcript of the lively Spiegel video from 7 June 2010 reveals this unknown story. A few weeks after it came out, German politicians broke a taboo and began to publicly question their 200-year-old tradition of taxing everyone for the salaries of clerics at a cost of €460 milllion every year.
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