No tax, no blessing, German churches say

BERLIN -- The road to heaven is paved with more than good intentions for Germany's 24 million Catholics. If they don't pay their religious taxes, they will be denied sacraments, including weddings, baptisms and funerals.

A decree issued last week by the country's bishops cast a spotlight on the long-standing practice in Germany and a few other European countries of governments levying taxes on registered believers and then handing over the money to the religious institutions.

In Germany, the surcharge for Catholics, Protestants and Jews is up to 9 percent. That's about $72 a month for a single person earning a pretax monthly salary of about $4,500.

For religious institutions, struggling to maintain their congregations in a secular society where the Protestant Reformation began 500 years ago, the tax revenue is vital.

Germany's Roman Catholic Church receives about $6.5 billion annually from the surcharge. For Protestants, the total is just above $5.2 billion. Donations, by contrast, represent a far smaller share of the churches' income than in the United States.

With rising prices and economic uncertainty, more and more Catholics and Protestants are opting to save their money and declare to tax authorities they are no longer church members, even if they still consider themselves believers.

"I quit the church already in 2007," said Manfred Gonschor, a Munich-based IT consultant. "It was when I got a bonus payment and realized that I could have paid myself a nice holiday alone on the amount of church tax that I was paying on it."

Such defections have hit the Catholic Church especially hard -- it lost about 181,000 taxpaying members in 2010 and 126,000 a year later, according to official figures. Protestants, who also number about 24 million, lost 145,000 registered members in Germany in 2010, the most recent year its figures are available.But those withdrawals include some people who still want to baptize their children, take communion on major religious holidays, marry in a religious ceremony and receive Christian burials.

The group We are Church, which claims to represent tens of thousands of grassroots Catholics, said many Germans stop paying the tax because they disagree with the church's policies or simply want to save money -- not because they have lost their faith.