Boycott The Kirchesteuer!

I have written about this already, but as the Kirchensteuer is now in the headlines it is fitting to say a couple of words more. 

Do not pay the Kirchensteuer! The Kirchensteuer is not used to make your Country more Catholic, but less. It is not used so that courageous priests may have ways to go on with their work, but so that too well-fed priest may continue to side with the world. It is used, as we see very often in interviews of Bishops and Cardinals, to undermine Catholicism. If you still do not see that it is the Kirchensteuer that made of Germany the enemy number one of Catholicism in the last fifty years, I question your intelligence.  

But most of all, the Kirchesteuer is simoniacal. It is simply unthinkable for every Catholic who isn’t a German that a priest might, under any circumstance whatsoever, refuse confession, or a Christian burial, or anything else, to a Catholic because he has not paid to him and his exactly so and so much. 

The Church has always lived because the charity of the Christians allowed her to be sustained, or because the Government has felt the need – as every Government must – to help her in her work. The idea of exacting such and such payment as a tribute due in order to remain part of the organisation is disgustingly Protestant, but at least the Protestants cannot even pretend to be the Church of Christ. 

What goes on in Germany is the utter absurdity of a Church in search of paying clients for her services, and demanding an exact price – rather than what the good heart of the faithful is ready to give – for the provision of them. This is utterly insane, and it is an indictment to the entire German people that they still do not get the situation in which they have put themselves in. 

The Kirchesteuer was originally born as a Protestant mechanism, born in order to organise tithing in the usually efficient German way. There was also a matter of expropriations, but such happened everywhere, and never were they used to justify simony.  Germans warmed to it, because it is very German to think “I do not mind paying, if I know my neighbour isn’t allowed to cheat on his payment”. What this does is to destroy the very concept of charity. Furthermore, it creates a church too fat to be brave, and too afraid to lose her paying clients. 

I have had Germans making an incredible face at being told that outside of the German space the Kirchesteuer could never exist. Sheesh. They thought you pay for your Sacrament like you pay for the cinema, or to the taxman. 

Sheer unbelievable. No concept of Sacrament. No idea of charity. Pure simony, and smart aleck reasoning.

It worked well when the income tax was low, and the Kirchensteuer was little more than a pittance. The poor paid very little and were mainly concerned that their neighbour miner or shipyard worker also paid, and the rich had thousand legal ways to reduce their tax burden and with it the Kirchensteuer. 

But what happened next, is that the German state expanded its activity like a cancer, multiplying the real tax burden of the poor, let alone the average citizen., as the real “poor” disappeared.  The income of the churches grew in the same  disproportionate measure (because a percentage of the total tax revenues), creating the situation we have today. What was born from a Protestant and German mentality to have a rather poor Church (including the Prods, who are largely Lutherans) has now become a monster sucking enormous resources against the simoniacal blackmail of “no sacraments” (some of them, at least). 

It is beyond me how a decent Catholic could ever accept such a situation. It is not that without paying the Kirchensteuer he is  forbidden to giving money to whatever organisation he wants! butit will not be to Cardinal Marx! It will not be to Cardinal Kasper! It will not be to Cardinal Woelki! Give your money for Christ’s work instead! SSPX! Kirche in Not! FSSP! The soup kitchen of your own parish, if it’s a good parish! But for Heaven’s sake, not to the Ministry of Sabotage! 

Some people might then say – but truly: only in Germany – that you shouldn’t de-register, because this equates to apostasy. How bloody freaking German! If Athanasius had been told “by appointing bishops you are putting yourself formally and officially in schism”, do you think he would have been impressed? Who is, outside of Germany, so stupid that he makes his Catholicism depend not on his baptism and communion with the Church, but with the payment of a tribute? How can a good Catholic ever be less Catholic because he wants to be Catholic exactly as the other Catholics all over the planet? Padre Pio never paid the Kirchensteuer!

Mind: a Catholic knows that it is his duty to sustain the effort of the Church. But this is a matter of charity, not taxes! The very idea that the sacramental life be in sony way, shape or form linked to the simoniacal concept of “payment for service” is so blatantly un-Christian that can only work about those worshippers of Authority known as the Germans. 

And if one were the type who doesn’t care, it would still be half understandable: “I don’t pay much, I don’t have discussions with my parents, and I look good in the village”. But if you care, how can you sleep at night knowing that your money finances prostituted priests and their pimps, the bishops and Cardinals? 

“But Mundabor! The Church finances and runs many other institutions: hospitals, hospices, structures of all kind!” 

Wonderful! Find the good ones, and donate your money directly to them, to be spent for their own purposes! Very probably, all tax deductible, it only needs for the institution to be registered as a recognised charity! You don’t have any limits! Donate all your income if you want to! But don’t give your money to that bunch of prostitutes, running a pro-homo brothel because you’re afraid to sign a paper! 

Boy, at times I think that if the Germans were told “from now on, by law, you can only criticise the government if you sign a paper stating that you are dumb” there would be millions of them taking the declaration seriously, and not criticising the Government! “Hey, it’s the law! I would have to say that I am dumb! Can’t do that, you know; I am not dumb, you see!” 

Time to wake up, folks.Aufwachen! 

Choose fidelity to Catholicism, not Cardinal Marx. 

M