Will the Church Have to Pay for Her Recovered Belongings in the Czech Republic?

On June 3, 2013, the Constitutional Court confirmed a law on restoring the goods of Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Jewish communities – nearly 2500 buildings and 495,000 acres of land confiscated by the Czechoslovakian power between 1948 and 1989. The different cults were also to receive a monetary compensation.

But in July 2018, this agreement – the fruit of many negotiations between the State, the Catholic Church, and the other cults – was questioned by a bill from the Czech Communist party, that wishes to tax the income from this compensation at 19%, on the pretext that it was excessive.

There is a good chance the bill will be voted in by Parliament; the Communists have 15 crucial votes and support the new administration of Andrej Babis, a populist billionaire who happens to be a former Communist.

The Catholic Church has spoken out: “How can you impose a tax on this? We are the creditors and the State is the debtor here; this is outrageous!” exclaimed Fr. Stanislav Pribyl, secretary general of the Episcopal Conference of the Czech Republic.

Will the Church receive the support of the Czech population? Nothing could be less certain, for the atheistic Communist era and the brutal transition to the liberal “values” of the secularized Western world have left their mark; in the last national census in 2011, 3.6 million of the country’s 10.6 million inhabitants declared they did not believe, and 5 million said they had no religion.

Poor, poor Europe.