Ulrich Siegmund is thirty-five years old, has a young daughter, a professional smile and the best electoral result in the history of Alternative for Germany: 44% in Saxony-Anhalt that leaves him just one seat away from governing a federal state on his own. 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 exit. He did not renounce anything: he himself has stated 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, that procedure turned him into a sacramental outcast: without communion, expelled from parish life, even exposed to 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 do not check the box on their tax return. But on Sunday this lucrative system, which constitutes a flagrant spiritual abuse, received its first serious warning of demolition.
A toll on baptism
The Kirchensteuer works with brutal simplicity. Every German registered as Catholic pays, through the tax office, an additional 8% to 9% on their income-tax liability. The State collects, keeps a commission of around 3% and transfers the rest to the dioceses. The only exit door is the Kirchenaustritt, the civil declaration of leaving the Church.
The consequences of signing that paper need not be deduced: they are written, black on white, in the General Decree of the German Bishops’ Conference on Leaving the Church, promulgated on 20 September 2012 and in force since 24 September of that year. The text first sets out the principle:
“Whoever declares his or her departure from the Church before the competent civil authority, for whatever reason, violates the duty to maintain communion with the Church (c. 209 §1 CIC) and the duty to contribute financially so that the Church can fulfil its purposes (c. 222 §1 CIC in conjunction with c. 1263 CIC)”.
[“Wer vor der zuständigen zivilen Behörde aus welchen Gründen auch immer seinen Kirchenaustritt erklärt, verstößt damit gegen die Pflicht, die Gemeinschaft mit der Kirche zu wahren (c. 209 §1 CIC), und gegen die Pflicht, seinen finanziellen Beitrag dazu zu leisten, dass die Kirche ihre Aufgaben erfüllen kann (c. 222 §1 CIC i.V.m. c. 1263 CIC)”].
The civil declaration constitutes, the decree states, “a grave offence against the ecclesial community” (“eine schwere Verfehlung gegenüber der kirchlichen Gemeinschaft”). It then lists the penalties with tariff-like precision:
“The declaration of leaving the Church entails the following legal consequences:
1. The person who has left the Church
– may not receive the sacraments of penance, the Eucharist, confirmation and the anointing of the sick, except in danger of death;
– may not hold ecclesiastical offices or exercise functions in the Church;
– may not be a sponsor for baptism or confirmation;
– may not be a member of parish or diocesan councils;
– loses the right to active and passive suffrage in the Church;
– may not be a member of public ecclesiastical associations”.
To marry in the Church, explicit permission from the local ordinary will be required, after a promise to keep the faith and raise the children Catholic (point 2). If the person works for the Church, the employment consequences provided for are triggered, i.e. dismissal (point 4). And point 3 reaches even to the grave:
“If the person who has left the Church has not shown any sign of repentance before death, the ecclesiastical funeral may be denied”.
[“Falls die aus der Kirche ausgetretene Person nicht vor dem Tod irgendein Zeichen der Reue gezeigt hat, kann das kirchliche Begräbnis verweigert werden”.]
The denial is optional—the parish priest decides, relying on the figure of the “manifest sinner” in canon 1184—and many German priests do not apply it. But the threat is written in a decree that is still in force, and every German who signs the exit receives, in addition, by mandate of the same decree, a standard pastoral letter from his or her parish priest notifying them, one by one, of all these consequences, including the funeral one.
Such an architecture makes ecclesial communion tradeable according to a fiscal scale: whoever stops paying ceases, in practice, to be a Catholic in full standing, even if they pray the rosary daily; whoever pays the state tax remains one even if they have not 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 administrative act alone is enough, “for whatever reason”. The Holy See itself had taught exactly 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 13 March 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 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 true separation with respect to 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 ones competent to judge it (n. 5). And it concludes with the theological principle that the German system tramples:
“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 by reason of any act or fact of defection” (n. 7).
Six years after proclaiming that doctrine, the Congregation for Bishops granted the recognitio (28 August 2012, Prot. n. 834/84) to the German decree that sacramentally sanctions the mere registry procedure, as the DBK itself took care to underline in order to clothe 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 thousands of millions weighed in the balance.
Conditioning the sacraments—the grace, in a vocabulary that the German synods hardly use any more—to the payment of a state tribute constitutes an institutionalised form of spiritual abuse. Simony with payroll retention. Its victims number in the millions: Germans of baptism and Catholic culture, like Siegmund, pushed to choose between their pocket and a belonging that the Church itself sold them as a tariffed commodity.
The paradox of the full coffer and the empty temple
The 2025 figures, published by the Bishops’ Conference itself, paint an unretouched portrait. The 27 dioceses collected 6.751 billion euros in Kirchensteuer, the second-best year in their history after 2022. That same year 307,117 people left the Church, 109,028 baptisms were celebrated—half as many as a decade ago—19,478 religious weddings, and Sunday attendance stood at a meagre 6.8% of Catholics. Across Germany there were 25 priestly ordinations. Twenty-five, for twenty-seven dioceses. In twenty years the German Church has lost more than a quarter of its faithful and increased its revenue by 70%.
The explanation of the paradox is purely accounting: the tax is linked to wages and capital income, which are rising, while those who leave are young people who barely paid tax. A machine for squeezing the generation now retiring, the last one that pays. The internal calculations of the dioceses, which have already announced cuts of more than 550 million, take for granted the collapse when the generation of the economic miracle leaves working life; the next one has already left or was never baptized.
With that money the best-paid ecclesiastical apparatus on the planet has been financed in the meantime—with episcopal salaries paid largely by the State by virtue of the old Staatsleistungen—an archipelago of diocesan bureaucracies and the most expensive toy of all: the Synodal Way, that permanent assembly that for years has been demanding from Rome blessings for homosexual couples, female diaconate and revision of sexual morality, sustained entirely by the tax coffers. The Church with the fewest vocations and the least practice in the West claims to give doctrinal lessons to the rest, and it can do so for one reason only: it pays.
Why panic is spreading
What happened on Sunday in Saxony-Anhalt explains the episcopal nervousness better than any poll. The programme with which Siegmund came close to an absolute majority proposes abolishing the payments of the federal state to the churches, ending the state collection of the Kirchensteuer and charging for church asylum. The bishop of Magdeburg, Gerhard Feige, asked for the vote against AfD right up to election morning; the 44% of voters answered him with what they think of his advice. In two weeks Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin vote. In Saxony-Anhalt Catholics make up barely 3% of the population. Eastern Germany is already post-Christian territory, and the pastors there are not fighting for souls they lost decades ago, but for the funding model that the East may begin to dismantle.
That is where the real fragility of the system lies: the Kirchensteuer does not rest on any divine right but on historical inertia and on the will of political power to continue lending its tax-collection apparatus. It would be enough for a regional government, and then a federal one, to withdraw the tax office from the equation for the German Church to have to do what all the others do: ask its faithful to give freely. With 6.8% Sunday practice, everyone in Bonn and Fulda knows what that would mean.
The bill reaches Rome
The matter ceased long ago to be a German problem. The Holy See drags structural deficits of tens of millions and a multi-billion hole in its pension fund, and in that picture Germany has for decades been the silent and indispensable contributor: contributions from the Association of Dioceses (VDD) to the support of institutions of the Apostolic See, financing of universities, schools and Roman causes, the Peter’s Pence, and the gigantic network of aid works—Adveniat, Misereor, Missio, Renovabis—that waters the Church in half the world, from Latin America to Eastern Europe, and that in passing buys formidable influence in the receiving episcopates.
That money explains many silences. It explains why a Synodal Way in almost permanent doctrinal rebellion has been treated with kid gloves while others have been subjected to surgery without anaesthesia. Rome has tolerated in the German Church what it would not tolerate in any other because no other sustains its budget to such an extent. The question that Leo XIV will have to ask himself, and that his Secretariat for the Economy is already asking in a low voice, is what happens when that source dries up: through demographics, with the retirement of the last contributors, or through politics, if the dismantling that is emerging in Magdeburg reaches Berlin. Both paths lead to the same place; the first is mathematically certain but the second seems imminent.
The German Church is foundering before a society that has turned its back on it, clinging to the life-raft of a tax that manufactures administrative apostates at the rate of three hundred thousand a year. When that raft sinks—and the voters of Saxony-Anhalt have just dealt it the first blow—the Vatican will discover how much of its governance in recent decades was mortgaged to the Rhenish cash register. Perhaps then someone will remember that the Church lived for nineteen centuries without tax officials acting as sacristans, and that today it only grows where giving is an act of faith and not a wage retention.