The Vatican - a Tax Collector.

[sonex]

Pim, did you read this in today's paper. I find it quite unbelievable that the Vatican can demand payment for a christian burial or for even being a catholic.


".Germany's Catholic Church, which imposes a surcharge on the income taxes of registered believers, has warned those who fail to pay will be denied a Christian burial.

The levy, part of German law since the 19th century, increases income taxes by 8 or 9 per cent for the nation's 24 million registered Catholics. But a handful of believers have challenged the system. '''Pay and pray' is a completely wrong signal at the wrong time,'' the reformist movement We Are Church said. The decree from Catholic bishops went into effect on Monday.

Last year, 126,000 people terminated their tax liability by telling the government they had stopped being Catholic. The Vatican, run by the Pope (left), approved the decree."


Read more: www.theage.com.au/world/death-threat-over-tax-20120925-26j9z.html#ixzz27XG8JufG

[pim]

Unbelievable and ironic, sonex, given Germany's history as the cradle of the Protestant Reformation the central impulse of which came from German resentment at having to pay taxes to the Vatican back in the 1500s such as the notorious "Peter's Pence". Not sure how that would have been expressed in German: Peters Pfennig perhaps? They also had a low value coin called a "Groschen" which is related to the English "groat" which means the same thing. So Peters Groschen perhaps? There was also the infamous sale of indulgences ($100 to shorten Grandma's stint in Purgatory, but if you take out a mortgage on your house we can get her straight into heaven!). Go to Rome and feast your eyes on St Peter's Basilica. Paid for 100% by the sale of indulgences. The old Opera House Lottery in NSW had nothing on this scam! It was a doozie! Need some advice about putting a business model together? Talk to the experts: the Vatican!

So according to this report the Vatican have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the past 500 years.

Religion is different over there. Recall that the great Wars of Religion in the 1500s and 1600s had Germany as their battleground. There was a Treaty of Augsburg in which the central tenet was the principle cujus religio, ejus regio which means that your religion was determined by the district in which you lived. So if you lived in the South, which was predominantly Catholic, then you were katholisch. And if you lived in the Protestant north then you were evangelisch - which basically determined the religious fault line of Europe and settled the religion question until modern times when 10 million East Germans were uprooted by the Soviets and forced to flee westwards. Half a million of them came to Australia as refugees. They were also overwhelmingly Protestant but they lived anywhere and everywhere in West Germany - Catholic areas included. It basically reshuffled the "confessional" deck of cards. Add to that the millions of Muslim Turks and other minorities and the religious settlement of the Treaty of Augsburg of over 300 years ago is now utterly irrelevant to the realities of 21st century Germany.

The article you posted, sonex, mentions that these religious taxes go back, in some cases, to the 19th century. That smells of Bismarck to me. He blugeoned the former German patchwork quilt of principalities, little kingdoms, counties and duchies into a "Reich". But having done his butcher's work of "Blut und Eisen" (blood and iron) in achieving German unification, he threw several bones to the German regions by respecting ancient and historical religious settlements - even supporting established religions through giving them a slice of the tax pie. For example the Germans don't have fee-charging and taxpayer subsidised church schools like we do since in, say, Bavaria where the vast majority is Catholic, the government schools have religion on the curriculum and of course since Bavaria is a Catholic state the type of religion on the curriculum will be Catholicism. So I'd see the burial tax in that overall context.

The debate would be about whether or not all this stuff reflects the demographic and social realities of 21st century Germany. It would seem to be that the best people to carry on that debate would be the German people themselves! I think I might have seen something about these burial taxes in the (highly respected!) German news magazine Der Spiegel not too long ago. So it appears that the debate is alive and well over there!

[sonex]

Paying for escape from Purgatory still exists. My sister in the UK, a very staunch catholic has occasionally asked my brother and I to contribute to the cost of a mass to shorten our parents time in purgatory. I do contribute, out of love for my sister, not because I believe in this scam. One would think that very rich people would spend a minimum of time there, maybe they leave a substantial amount of money for this very cause.