Why churchgoers are being charged £16,000 after moving to Germany

Picture the scene: you’ve just moved to Germany, and are busily working your way through the reams of bureaucracy that accompany any move abroad.

Forms upon forms. So many that the odd mistake or omission creeps in, betraying your eagerness to get on with your new life, perhaps, but surely of little lasting consequence.

Except, that is, if you’re a lapsed Catholic, in which case it could allegedly cost you €19,000 (£16,000).

That is how much a British former churchgoer claims he has been billed by the Catholic Church, eight years after arriving in Munich, for allegedly failing to pay a levy imposed on certain religious communities.

The arrears are owed because he forgot to officially renounce his faith, he says, highlighting  a curious facet of German law that is centuries-old but continues to catch people unaware to this day.

Known as the church tax, or Kirchensteuer, it can equate to 9 per cent of a person’s total income tax bill and forms the backbone of church finances in Europe’s largest economy.

It is imposed on Catholics, Protestants and Jews, and many newcomers to the country unwittingly end up paying it after declaring their religious affiliation while completing documentation required to register their address.

Germans initially brought up as atheists in communist East Germany before reunification have been caught out by the law, as have expats from around Europe.

In fact, there’s only one way out – yet another form, filed at one of the country’s state registry offices.

A representative for the Catholic Church in Germany told The Telegraph that demands for church-tax back payments from unwitting foreigners were “a known phenomenon” which often impact expats from predominantly Catholic countries such as France and Italy.

In those nations, the division of church and state is taken more seriously and the church is financed via other means. All the same, it is still customary for many Catholics to baptise their children regardless of how often they actually go to church.

In Germany, that means even those who turn away from the faith later in life can be stung with the levy or fined for failing to make payments, unless they’re aware of the rules upon arriving in the country and act to opt out.

‘Solicitors wouldn’t go near the case’

Writing on her blog, the mother of the British man who has lived in Munich for the past eight years says that her son “had no idea” he was supposed to be paying church tax, having never declared he was baptised or formerly of a religious affiliation on any official documents.

She claims he was presented with his fine after local Catholic officials obtained copies of his baptismal and confirmation certificates from the UK. International data sharing of this sort is reportedly common among different outposts of the Church.

“Mum, you are not going to believe this. Turns out that because I am a Catholic and because I didn’t renounce my ‘faith’ when I arrived in Munich, apparently I should have been paying church tax to the Church,” he allegedly told her.

Her son is now expected to pay the €19,000 (£16,300) fine in full because “none of the three solicitors he contacted were prepared to touch his case with a barge pole”, she says.

The Telegraph has not been able to identify either individual, or verify the details of the case, but other instances of church-tax disputes have been the subject of intense public focus in years gone by.

Most famously, the Italian footballer Luca Toni was confronted with a multimillion-euro demand for payment after leaving Germany in 2009 following a spell playing for Bayern Munich.

During his time in the country, Toni’s tax adviser told local authorities the striker “didn’t belong to a faith”.

But when the Catholic Church checked this statement against church records in Toni’s hometown of Modena, they found he had in fact been baptised and demanded a back payment of close to €2 million (£1.7 million).

Toni later said he was unaware that all Catholics had to pay the tax regardless of whether they were a member of a German parish and blamed his tax adviser for not informing him about the law.

The star striker eventually won a court case against his tax advisers, who were told to compensate him for the sum.

The Catholic Church admits that, if it has grounds to believe that someone is a church member in the home country, it makes inquiries with their local parish to see if their name appears on any church register.

The German Council of Bishops, the country’s central Catholic organ, insists that all foreigners face the same tax rules as Germans and that the decision on whether to demand it is “based on baptism, regardless of whether this took place in one’s home country or in Germany”.

Moreover, it says Kirchensteuer, first introduced in the 19th century, is a fair way of financing the church – pointing to the fact that it is income-adjusted, meaning members contribute in accordance with what they can afford.

In southern Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, it equates to 8 per cent of income tax when applied, a little less than the 9 per cent paid across the rest of Germany. But the archaic system has few supporters, having irked more than just bemused expats in recent decades. Polling shows that around three quarters of the country want to see it abolished.

Controversy surrounds the fact that the tax is used in part to finance the generous salaries of archbishops, who take home more than €100,000 (£85,800) a year. It is also still used to repay the Catholic Church for the expropriation of lands in the early 19th century, something the current government, led by Olaf Scholz, has said it wants to put an end to.

Any move to end the tax could herald financial trouble for religious institutions – including the Catholic Church – which still play an important role in running hospitals, nurseries and care homes, and remain some of the largest employers in the country.

For the time being, however, the tax’s revenue-generating powers only appear to be on the rise, with the latest figures revealing that nearly €7 billion (£6 billion) was taken in 2022, the latest year for which figures are available, up from €4 billion (£3.4 billion) two decades ago.

This is despite a plunge in church membership numbers – a counterintuitive phenomenon that has been sarcastically termed the Kirchensteuerwunder, or church-tax miracle, by critics.

The exile of members in recent years came on the back of several reports into sexual abuse that came to damning conclusions about an unwillingness on the part of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy to grapple with wrongdoing.

Things haven’t looked much better for the Protestant church either, with congregants leaving in similar numbers despite it largely avoiding any similar controversy.

A YouGov poll carried out last year found that paying the church tax was the second most cited reason for leaving the church, after the abuse scandals.

Clearly then, opting out is increasingly in.