Germany
Just 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.
Benedict XVI's first appointment was Walter Mixa as Bishop of Augsburg but in 2010 he was forced to resign after he came under investigation for beating children in an orphanage and embezzling funds from it. 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.
The German postwar constitution was carefully designed by the Allies to decentralise the country and hence it handed over many formerly federal powers to the individual states. Thus the federal government has lost the constitutional power to revise the concordat. Instead, it is left up to the states to renegotiate directly with the Vatican in areas like education which under their control. This allows the Vatican to push for the maximal concessions obtainable in each region of the country. The Vatican now has a web of concordats throughout Germany concerning individual states and even individual institutions. These are further cemented by numerous statutes, regulations, ordinances and other agreements.
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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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. (This is in addition to the “church tax” for members.)
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How far can German churches discriminate against more than a million employees? |
German courts impose church regulations on more than a million workers. These employees work in institutions run by the churches but overwhelmingly subsidised by the state. The powerful German churches got themselves exempted from the 2006 antidiscrimination law. Now recent court cases have begun testing how far the churches can go in insisting that the private lives of their employees conform with their teachings. | |
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Europe tells German churches to respect employees’ private lives |
In September 2010 the European Court of Human Rights handed down a landmark judgment telling German courts to no longer uncritically accept almost any assertion by the churches that an employees’s private life would damage their credibility. They must take into account many factors other than the church’s “right to self-determination”. Schüth v. Germany (ECHR no. 1620/03) | |
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Money for silence |
Former Bishop of Regensburg, Gerhard Ludwig Müller, didn’t tell the police about a priest in his dociese who abused children, but he did sue the journalist who called the secret payments to victims “hush money”. The Bishop got a court to order the deletion of a summary of his actions from a Spiegel article. Here is a translation of a full account of this case which escaped the ban. Update: on 2 July 2012 who, of all people, was appointed by the pope to handle Vatican abuse cases? Yes, really. | |
