La financiación de la Iglesia Católica en España

Abstract

The expropriation of Church land and property and abolition of tithes in the 19 th century badly affected the normal economic maintenance of the Catholic Church in Spain, leading to a collapse in ecclesiastical finances, which then had to be assisted for a century and a half by grants from the General Budget of the State, leading to a situation of economic dependency on the part of the Church with regard to the State. This article proposes to base the maintenance of the Catholic Church and of other Religious Confessions, dependent on the offerings of their faithful, on a generous system of fiscal deductions, with built in incentives, similar to those offered to other non profit-making bodies. This is the chosen model for channeling economic cooperation from the State to Religious Confessions in models which are characterized by a noted neutrality of the State in relation to religious groupings, as is the case in France and the United States; it would achieve two important objectives: 1) The full self-financing of the Catholic Church, in such a way that the sensibility of the faithful with regard to their duty of maintaining the Church is achieved. 2) The economic independence of the Catholic Church with regard to the State, thus protecting it from the influence of the political changes which come about through time. The need to achieve both these objectives starts from the same premise: that of training the faithful in the mentality that it is their duty to economically support the Church by their offerings, because, if this goal is not achieved, it is likely that the problem will continue indefinitely into the future.