Germany’s Catholic Church received a record £5.3 billion (€6 billion) in tax money last year, a newspaper investigation has found.
The country’s 27 dioceses also have a fortune of at least £23 billion, including large investments in real estate and equities, making the German Church probably the wealthiest Catholic institution in Europe other than the Vatican.
The German business newspaper Handelsblatt reported that despite more than 2.2 million Germans formally deregistering from the Church since 2000, the country’s strong economy had helped boost tax revenue to record levels.
Under the country’s church tax laws, the government deducts a levy of eight to nine per cent from the income of registered church members and hands it to the country’s various churches, including the Catholic Church.
As well as receiving the large sums from registered Catholics, the German Church has numerous assets and investments.
Handelsblatt said that the Church has total financial investments of £13 billion, and of at least £18 billion in fixed assets such as real estate and equities. The diocese with the highest equity is Paderborn, which has £3.1 billion, followed by Munich-Freising with £2.5 billion, and Cologne with £2.3 billion.
The figures come despite the number of Catholics regularly attending Mass falling substantially since the 1960s. In 2015, 2.5 million Catholics went to church on Sunday, compared with 11.5 million half a century earlier.
In an article for the Catholic Herald last year, Anian Christoph Wimmer, editor of CNA Deutsch, wrote that, while there were 23.8 million Catholics in Germany, only one in 10 of them attended Mass on a Sunday. “That figure,” he wrote, “is down one third from 2000.”
Priest ‘cured of cancer’ after praying to Nazi-era martyr
A priest in Florida has said that he was cured of skin cancer after praying to a friar who was killed by the Nazis.
Fr Michael Driscoll, based in the coastal city of Boca Raton, was diagnosed with advanced melanoma in 2004. He was given a relic of Blessed Titus Brandsma, a Dutch Carmelite friar who died in Dachau concentration camp, and applied it to his head every day.
Fr Driscoll was later declared cancer free. His doctor told him his healing could not be explained. “He said, ‘You have no need to come back. You’re healed’,” Fr Driscoll told local television station CBS 12. “I’m happy I’m alive.”
Fr Driscoll said the Diocese of Palm Beach had spent two years investigating the case and had passed its findings on to the Vatican.
Blessed Titus, a philosophy professor who founded a university at Nijmegen in the Netherlands, was arrested for promoting resistance to the Nazi occupation. He had hand delivered a letter from the country’s bishops to newspaper editors urging them to defy an order to print official Nazi documents.
He was declared Blessed in 1985. In 2005 he was voted by Nijmegen residents as the greatest figure to have lived there.
Francis comforts sick children
Pope Francis has made a surprise visit to sick children in the care of the Vatican’s Bambino Gesù Hospital outside Rome.
A communique said he offered comfort to patients as well as parents. The visit continued his “Mercy Friday” custom of visiting people in difficult situations. The Vatican hospital is currently hosting an exhibition called “Dear Pope, I’ll give you a drawing”, featuring drawings given to the Pope by children around the world.
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