The Protestant and Catholic churches receive annual compensation payments for their expropriation at the beginning of the 19th century. This practice has been abolished for decades. The traffic light tries again. The sum of around ten billion euros is said to be in the room.
The state’s annual compensation payments to the two major Christian churches are once again under scrutiny. According to a spokesman for the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), “intensive and trusting talks” are currently being held between the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the federal states and churches. In May 2021, two opposition draft laws that provided for the abolition of so-called state benefits failed to achieve the necessary majority in the Bundestag. At that time it was said that a solution could only be found after the federal elections.
According to information from “Bild”, the churches are demanding a replacement of eleven billion euros. Neither the EKD nor the German Bishops’ Conference confirmed the number. “In fact, nothing can be said about the numbers and time frame at the moment,” said an EKD spokesman. The Evangelical Church welcomes the fact that the coalition is tackling the replacement and wants to create a “fair framework” for it. “The negotiations have been going very well so far,” said FDP religious politician Sandra Bubendorfer-Licht in the newspaper.
The Catholic Bishop of Eichstätt, Gregor Hanke, told the “Bild” newspaper that he was “in favor of a quick and amicable solution to ending state services – if the churches play gambles now, they will end up without a significant fee given the rapidly declining social importance of the churches”. . However, it is problematic if the federal government passes laws and the states have to pay.
The money is state consideration for the expropriation of German churches and monasteries at the beginning of the 19th century as part of secularization. With the exception of Hamburg and Bremen, all federal states therefore pay an annual sum to the Catholic and Protestant churches. Most recently it was around 550 million euros per year.
As the EKD spokesman said, state services make up a significant part of the budgets in a number of regional evangelical churches. So that the “tasks of the church, not least in social work, can continue to be fulfilled in the future, the churches consider a value replacement according to the equivalence principle to be correct.”
The Weimar constitution already provided for the regular payments to be replaced by a one-time appropriate compensation. This project was included in the Basic Law – but has not been implemented to this day.
In the “Zeit” the SPD church commissioner Lars Castellucci said that the traffic light coalition wanted to replace the state services. Key points should be available in the coming year, and the necessary law should be passed in 2024.
So far, the amount of the fee has always been a major argument. According to the Catholic German Bishops’ Conference, the solutions discussed ranged from ten times – i.e. currently five and a half billion euros once – to 40 times the annual total, which would then be 22 billion euros.