Ulrich Siegmund is thirty-five years old, has a young daughter, a professional smile, and achieved the best electoral result in the history of Alternative for Germany: 44% in Saxony-Anhalt , leaving him just one seat away from governing a federal state alone. Siegmund was baptized and raised in the Catholic Church. In 2017, he went to a civil registry office , paid the corresponding administrative fee, and signed his departure. He didn’t renounce anything: he himself has declared that he carries Catholic values ”in his heart” and that what he rejects is the German institution that administers them. In the eyes of the German ecclesiastical system, however, this procedure made him a sacramental outcast: without communion, expelled from parish life, and even at risk of being denied a Catholic funeral if he dies.
The rest of the universal Church views this German anomaly with a mixture of astonishment and poorly disguised envy. More than one Spanish prelate would love to excommunicate those who don’t mark the box on their declaration. But on Sunday, this lucrative system, which constitutes a blatant spiritual abuse, received its first serious warning of impending demolition.
The Kirchensteuer works with brutal simplicity. Every German registered as Catholic pays, through the tax authorities, an additional 8% to 9% on their income tax. The state collects the tax, keeps a commission of around 3% , and transfers the rest to the dioceses. The only way out is through the Kirchenaustritt , the civil declaration of leaving the Church.
The consequences of signing that document don’t need to be deduced: they are written, in black and white, in the General Decree of the German Bishops’ Conference on Leaving the Church , promulgated on September 20, 2012, and in force since September 24 of that year. The text first establishes the principle:
“Whoever declares his departure from the Church before the competent civil authority, for whatever reasons , infringes the duty to maintain communion with the Church (c. 209 §1 CIC) and the duty to make his financial contribution so that the Church can fulfill its purposes (c. 222 §1 CIC in relation to c. 1263 CIC).”
The civil declaration constitutes, the decree says, “ a grave offense against the ecclesial community.” It then lists the penalties with precise, almost tariff-like detail:
“The declaration of leaving the Church entails the following legal consequences:
1. A person who has left the Church
– cannot receive the sacraments of penance, the Eucharist, confirmation, and anointing of the sick, except in danger of death;
– cannot hold ecclesiastical offices or perform functions in the Church;
– cannot be a godparent at baptism or confirmation;
– cannot be a member of parish or diocesan councils;
– loses the right to vote and to be elected in the Church;
– cannot be a member of public ecclesiastical associations.
To marry in the Church, you will need express permission from the local ordinary, after promising to preserve the faith and raise your children in the Catholic faith (point 2). If you work for the Church, the foreseen employment consequences apply, namely, dismissal (point 4). And point 3 extends to the grave:
“If the person who has left the Church has not shown any sign of repentance before death, he or she may be denied a church funeral .”
The refusal is discretionary—the parish priest decides, relying on the concept of the “manifest sinner” in canon 1184—and many German priests do not apply it. But the threat is written into a current decree, and every German who signs the resignation also receives, by mandate of the same decree , a standard pastoral letter from their parish priest notifying them, one by one, of all these consequences, including the funeral one.
Such an architecture effectively values ecclesial communion according to a tax scale: those who stop paying cease, in practice, to be fully Catholic, even if they pray the rosary daily; those who pay the state tax remain Catholic even if they haven’t set foot in a church since their First Communion. Note that the decree does not require investigating whether there was apostasy, heresy, or schism; the procedure itself suffices, “for whatever reason.” The Holy See itself had taught precisely the opposite. The Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, with the prior decision of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, established in its circular letter of March 13, 2006, to all presidents of episcopal conferences:
“The legal-administrative act of leaving the Church cannot in itself constitute a formal act of defection in the sense that this has in the CIC, because the will to persevere in the communion of faith could remain” (n. 3).
For true defection to exist, the Roman document specifies, there must be “a genuine separation from the constitutive elements of the life of the Church: it therefore presupposes an act of apostasy, heresy, or schism” (n. 2), manifested in writing before the ordinary or the parish priest, the only one competent to judge it (n. 5). And it concludes with the theological principle that the German system tramples upon:
“It is clear, in any case, that the sacramental bond of belonging to the Body of Christ which is the Church, given by the baptismal character, is a permanent ontological union and is not lost because of any act or fact of defection ” (n. 7).
Six years after proclaiming that doctrine, the Congregation for Bishops granted recognitio (August 28, 2012, Prot. n. 834/84) to the German decree that sacramentally sanctions the mere registration process, as the DBK itself took pains to emphasize in order to imbue it with “the necessary acceptance of the universal legislator.” Rome wrote the doctrine in 2006 and signed the German exception in 2012 ; the reader can calculate how many billions weighed on the scales.
Conditioning the sacraments—grace, in a vocabulary that German synods hardly use anymore—on the payment of a state tax constitutes an institutionalized form of spiritual abuse. Simony with payroll deduction . Its victims number in the millions: Germans by baptism and Catholic culture, like Siegmund, forced to choose between their own pockets and a membership that the Church itself sold them as a priced commodity.
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