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Be it considered that God hath committed
His sheep to our Holy Father to be fed, not to be shorn....
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Complaint to Pope Gregory XI, 1376
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In the early Church financial contributions were purely voluntary.
Soon emperors made grants of public money to the Church*.
This position changed as soon as the Church had acquired sufficient
power, when payment became compulsory for all. The ostensible
idea was that the proceeds should go to the relief of the poor.
To this end the Church collected tithes amounting to a tenth
part of the produce of lands, the stock on those lands, and
the personal industry of the occupiers.
Biblical authority was found to justify payment to the clergy,
though the passage in question had to be stretched beyond its
literal meaning: "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he
treadeth out the corn" (Deuteronomy 25:4). If even oxen
were entitled to the occasional mouthful of people's food then
surely a priest was also entitled! St Paul had quoted this passage
to justify the fact that he did not need to work for his living
(1 Corinthians 9:9), and priests did likewise. The idea of taking
a tenth part of a wide range of goods was borrowed from Leviticus
27:30-32, ten per cent being the proportion that was supposed
to be holy unto the Lord. Ten per cent of the gross domestic
product of Christendom represented an enormous amount of money.
The tax was levied on all, including non-Christians. It was
paid on corn, hay, all of Earth's fruits, animals, even wine.
Some bishops extended it to handicrafts.
By the Middle Ages the system was being badly abused. As a
leading authority says: "Owing to the machinations of the
monks in the Middle Ages, the tithes were very largely drawn
into the coffers of religious houses, and the parochial clergy
were deprived of them"*.
The pastoral role of the Church became not so much to shepherd
their sheep as to fleece them. The tax was enforced where necessary
in the courts. Anyone who failed to pay was also liable to be
excommunicated. In Western Christendom the obligation was made
universal and legally binding by Charlemagne. The only ones
exempted from payment were the Church itself and the Crown.
If the traditional relationship between Church and State has
been symbiotic, that between Church and populace has traditionally
been parasitic. The people paid taxes to the Church, but the
Church did not pay taxes to the State. In 1296 Pope Boniface
VIII published a bull, Clericis laicos, that forbade
the clergy to pay taxes to secular powers.
Passages like Leviticus 27:30-32 could also be used to justify
taking the first fruits, or annates. The Pope as head
of the Church claimed to be entitled to the whole of the first
year's profits of a spiritual endowment*.
Up until the Reformation a large portion of Britain's wealth
found its way to the Pope under the terms of this tax. For many
centuries the whole of Western Christendom funded the excesses
of corrupt French and Italian families who competed with each
other to control the papacy. Churchmen enjoyed a huge proportion
of the fruits of economic production throughout Christendom.
In the popular mind, bishops and archbishops were oppressers
just as much as the Sheriff of Nottingham. In a ballad called
Gest of Robyn Hood recorded at the end of the fifteenth
century, but probably much older, Robyn identifies his targets
to Litell Johnn:
These bisshoppes and these archebishoppes,
Ye shall them bete and bynde
The hye sheriff of Notyngham,
Hym holde ye in your mynde.
(The First Fytte ll 56-59)
In England the Church disposed of around a quarter of the gross
national product, in parts of Germany the figure was more than
a third, and in parts of France around a half. The Church held
lands in similar proportions, and this was typical throughout
Christendom as far east as Russia. Everywhere, greedy and ambitious
men climbed the Church hierarchy to enrich themselves. Some,
like Talleyrand, Napolean's Foreign Minister, had become bishops
without even being Christian believers. Priests and bishops
deserted in droves during the French Revolution when the clerical
unpopularity became manifest, and the Church no longer offered
power, wealth and a comfortable existence.
In England after the Reformation, tithes continued to be collected
by the Church of England. Those who did not want to pay, notably
Quakers, were persecuted and imprisoned. In Ireland Roman Catholics
were obliged to pay tithes to the Anglican Church, leading to
the tithe wars in which the Christians on both sides exceeded
themselves in inflicting barbarities on each other. Under the
Tithe Act of 1836 most English tithes were abolished and commuted
into rent charges. Following the further expression of dissatisfaction
by farmers in the twentieth century, Acts of 1936 and 1958 commuted
payments into lump sums to be redeemed by instalments up to
the year 2000.
In Scotland there were similar stories. William Spears (1812
- 1885) led a revolt against the tithes on fish levied by the
Church of Scotland, which had continued even after the great
Disruption of 1843 when most fishermen left the established
Church. Impoverished by the cost of paying off future tithe
liabilities, the fishermen were obliged to continue fishing
even in dangerous conditions, with predicable consequences,
one of which was the Eyemouth Disaster. On the 14 th October
1881 most of the fishing fleet of Eyemouth, some 20 boats and
129 men from the town were lost in a storm. No established Church
anywhere seems to have expressed any qualms about extorting
money from poor and unwilling victims, nor the consequences
of doing so.
Other taxes included clerical tenths , and various specialised
tithes. For example so-called "Saladin tithes" were
instituted during the Crusades, ostensibly to fund these holy
wars. A Saladin tithe raised in 1188 required a payment of 10
per cent on revenue and movable property, payable by every lay
subject in England and France. Anyone who refused to pay was
reduced to bondage. In practice much of the money raised stayed
within Church coffers, and such tithes continued to be raised
long after the Crusades had failed. As an authority on the Crusades
has put it:
While prelates spent their money on fine horses and pet monkeys,
their agents raised money by the wholesale redemption of Crusading
vows. None of the clergy would contribute to the taxes levied
to pay for the Crusades, though St Louis, to their rage, had
refused them exemption. Meanwhile the general public was taxed
again and again for Crusades that never took place*.
Since the time of Pope Gregory I, peasants had been paying
land taxes, marriage taxes and death duties — collected
by clergymen dressed in the manner of imperial officers. In
the Middle Ages, death duties had to be paid to the feudal lord
(heriot) and to the Church (mortuary). Certain
abbeys could claim goods to the value of up to a third of a
dead person's possessions — man or woman. Peasants would
take the dead person's belongings along to the church when they
took the body to be buried (often their beds and bedding) in
order to pay the tax. If the tax was not paid then the body
would be denied a Christian burial. In practice the tax was
not always enough. People were denied the last rights if they
did not also make a gift, and they might still be denied burial
if the relatives did not provide a further gift. Sometimes relatives
were excommunicated for failing to make such gifts — even
if they were not themselves beneficiaries of the will. Sometimes
the Church as feudal lord could claim both heriot and
mortuary taxes. These taxes were oppressive and widely
resented, but the Church was unwilling to relent. It held fast
to the view that God had sanctioned these taxes, and that it
would therefore be sinful to fail to collect them. The dead
commonly remained unburied until the family of the deceased
paid their mortuary tax. The insensitivity of the Church
in this respect could have serious consequences. In 1511 a London
man, Richard Hunne, refused to hand over to a priest the christening/burial
robe of his dead five-week-old child, an event that fuelled
the English Reformation as much as the marital arrangements
of Henry VIII. The case became famous; Hunne went to law and
was murdered in 1514.
Although the Church was a legal entity, it did not die like
an ordinary person, and so did not have to pay death duties.
Property that passed into the "dead hand" (mortmain)
of the Church was therefore permanently exempt from this form
of taxation. This opened up possibilities for tax evasion on
the part of rich citizens with the complicity of the Church.
The Church was not averse to making a turn on their dishonesty,
and the system was widely abused throughout Christendom. In
England, Church and State struggled for centuries over these
practices until the Mortmain Act of 1736 eventually abolished
them.
Churches, and other religious groups, still enjoy a range of
financial exemptions and privileges. Broadly they do not pay
indirect taxes at all, either on their income or capital, which
means that ordinary taxpayers have to pay many billions of pounds
extra to meet the requirements of the exchequer.
Churches are still being given special
privileges, even in new laws. When the community charge (or
poll tax) was introduced in England in 1990, members of religious
orders were amongst the few who were exempt. On the other hand
taxpayers are heavily subsidising Church activities. For example
Churches pay less than 2 per cent of the costs of their schools
in England, the rest is borne by taxpayers*.
What this means is that ordinary taxpayers are paying Churches
to indoctrinate the children of their followers and to employ
teachers on the grounds of their religious beliefs rather than
their ability.
Other liberal democracies also support favoured sects. The
Evangelical Lutheran Church, for example, continues to receive
State support in Denmark , and similar systems operate elsewhere
in Scandinavia. In the USA, which purports to keep Church and
State separate, Churches are exempt from property taxes, although
there is no legal reason why they should be. In the 1960s this
was estimated to cost every American family $140 per annum*,
and the figure must now be many times that.
Elsewhere, Churches have enjoyed even greater privileges. Up
until 1979 Spanish taxpayers had part of their payments automatically
paid to the Roman Catholic Church. Now they have a choice of
paying it to the Church or to the state's welfare and culture
budgets. So few people chose to pay their tax to the Church
that the Spanish state pays a “top-up” out of general
taxation amounting to tens of millions of Euros per annum. Politicians
recognise that the system is unsustainable and yet it continues
year after year*. The European
Commission ruled in 2005 that the Spanish government was in
breach of EU law because it exempted the Church from Value Added
Tax. Church land and property is still exempted from rates,
and Roman Catholic schools are still massively subsidised*.
Spanish colonies had similar laws, which often survived the
collapse of empire. Chile won its independence from Spain early
in the nineteenth century, but it continued to protect and subsidise
the Roman Catholic Church, and still does so. In Germany the
State deducts a Church tax along with income tax. Millions of
Euros are spent by the government on "state disbursements"
to religious communities that are really unconditional gifts
to recognised Churches*.
The position is worse in Italy, a supposedly secular state.
There the Church enjoys massive financial privileges, under
the Lateran Treaty or Concordat negotiated between Mussolini
and the Pope in 1929. These privileges not only continued but
were extended by Silvio Berlusconi's government in 2005 so that
Church businesses such as hostels and health clubs could benefit
from fiscal exemptions as well as retirement homes, schools,
monasteries, convents and assorted religious institutes. The
Roman Catholic Church owns in excess of 100,000 buildings in
Italy, almost all benefiting from tax privileges, even after
Berlusconi's legislation was amended in 2006. The Church benefits
through this financial discrimination by over 1,000,000,000
Euros a year, which means that ordinary tax payers are paying
in excess of a billion Euros more each year than they would
do in a truly secular country. At the time of writing this matter
is being investigated by the European Commission on the grounds
that it constitutes illegal state aid*.
The Roman Church built up its enormous wealth in a number of
ways. Tithes, tenths and first fruits were just a few among
many. Another source of income was the sale of indulgences.
In the time of Sixtus IV (pope 1471-1484) the sale of plenary
indulgences and Church offices accounted for a third of the
papal budget. Then there were payments for absolution following
serious crimes. Every crime had its price: so much for murder,
so much for incest, so much for sodomy, so much for masturbation,
and so on. According to the tariff published by the Roman chancery,
a deacon guilty of murder could expect to be absolved for 20
crowns. The sale of holy relics also brought in fantastic amounts
of money each year. The Roman catacombs became a vast treasure
store. Odd finger bones were sold to poor pilgrims and whole
skeletons to rich ones. All manner of relics were bought and
sold raising the equivalent of hundreds of millions, perhaps
billions, of dollars. Particularly impressive relics were housed
in holy shrines, which the public was allowed to view at certain
times, usually for a fee. Another source of funds was pimping.
The Church licensed brothels and on occasion boasted of the
employment it provided through prostitution. The Bishop of Winchester
was famous for owning and licensing the brothels in Southwark.
Pope Sixtus IV received 30,000 ducats a year from licensing
brothels in Rome. The Church also levied a charge on priests
who kept concubines. This sex tax, or cullagium as
it was called, went into the funds of local ecclesiastical authorities.
A bishop of Constance was reputed to have made a fortune out
of the tax on his priests, who fathered children at the rate
of 1,500 per annum*.
The Church raised money through professional begging, though
the beggars were dignified by titles such as mendicants and
quaestores. One group, the Beghards, seems to have given us
the English word beggar. Fees were charged for a range
of privileges, from admission to shrines to the right to be
buried inside a church. Admission to monasteries and nunneries
was generally restricted to the rich, and in order to enter
they were expected to bring a dowry with them. Unnecessary prohibitions
were enforced, then licences and dispensations were sold to
allow people to avoid them: permission to marry a distant relative,
permission to marry "out of season", permission for
a man of illegitimate birth to enter Holy Orders. The removal
of the heart or other organs from the dead for separate burial
was regarded by the Church as profane and abominable —
but papal licences could be bought to allow such dismemberment*.
There were hundreds of such exemptions to be purchased from
the Church Dispensations from consanguinity laws (which prevented
even distant relatives from marrying each other) brought in
a million gold florins a year in the fifteenth century. People
paid to have their names included on a bede-roll, which meant
that they would be specifically mentioned during Masses after
their deaths. Money would generally buy a proper burial for
those who were technically not allowed one: those who died in
jousts and duels, money-lenders, excommunicates, strangers to
the parish, mothers and infants who died in childbirth, clergymen's
wives, suicides, and so on. It was also possible to buy exemption
from persecution. Portuguese conversos (Christianised
Jews) for example paid 1,860,000 ducats to Philip III of Spain
to stop being persecuted in the early seventeenth century. A
papal decree was obtained and 410 prisoners released*.
It is difficult to see this as anything other than a kind of
official protection racket, especially since the same thing
happened many times, over many years, and in many places.
A useful standby was the sale of Church offices. Cardinals"
hats were always popular. They were often auctioned, and so
had no fixed price. In the time of Pope Leo X in the sixteenth
century, they were knocked down for, on average, around 30,000
ducats each. When funds ran low more offices could be invented
, or turnover could be increased by poisoning existing cardinals,
as Pope Alexander VI was known to do.
Procurations were taxes that were nominally collected to cover
the costs of a bishop's visits to his priests. In fact they
came to be collected whether or not such visits took place,
and in time the Pope claimed the right to all Procurations.
Yet another revenue earner was the practice of "reconciliation".
Anything or anyone who had been spiritually befouled needed
reconciling to the Church. Thus for example women needed reconciling
after the sinful activity of giving birth, and church buildings
required reconciliation if blood was shed in their precincts.
In some places reconciliation fees raised vast amounts of money.
  The
Church also raised money by charging people for exemptions from
restrictions and obligations. Thus for example one might buy
the right to eat forbidden foods on fast days. People could
buy the right to eat not only meat and fish but also eggs and
butter. Funds raised from butter exemptions alone were huge
— enough to fund new buildings. European cathedrals, including
Rouen, still possess so called butter-towers, paid for by the
proceeds of Lenten butter exemptions. Yet another example was
the right to waive the three Tobias nights after a marriage.
Every action by a priest was likely to incur a charge: the
saying "no penny, no paternoster" is a reference to
the practice of charging a mass stipend, or stole
fee, before a priest would perform his duties. Priests
who wanted to increase their revenue could generate the need
for exorcisms and masses, perhaps by discovering witchcraft,
or by organising ghostly visits, or by propagating stories of
vampires*.
The dead were a source of revenue, and not only because of
heriot and mortuary taxes. The living were led to believe that
time in Purgatory could be reduced by buying services from the
Church. As one historian puts it:
Men left large sums in their wills to be paid at the time
of their burial to priests, monks and nuns to say matins and
vespers of the dead for them, to poor bedesmen to say Paternosters
and Aves, to priests to say mass on the day, to anchorites
and anchoresses for prayers, to monasteries and friaries to
say mass for thirty days after death, and to keep a yearly
orbit*.
The transfer of land by will had been unknown to the Germanic
peoples of northern and western Europeans. It was introduced
by the Church to encourage the endowment of churches. In some
places the canon law was arranged in other ways to favour Church
interests. For example, wills were void if not made in the presence
of a clerk, and testators were obliged to include formal bequests
to the Church*.
In Anglo-Saxon times the English Church collected a tribute
called a church scot. Later the English paid to Rome
another tax called a Romescot, later still known as
Peter's Pence. Every family paid a penny on the feast
of St Peter, in theory voluntarily. King Alfred made the collection
official. In time popes came to regard it as a right, and made
the mistake of demanding payment, whereupon Parliament legislated
under Edward III that the tax was unconstitutional, and it was
never paid again. Roman Catholics in England now make the payment
voluntarily.
Only the tiniest fraction of this wealth was ever used for
its stated purpose — for example to help the poor. If it
had been, there would have been no need for separate "poor
boxes", or for so many private individuals to found alms
houses, hospitals or philanthropic charities. For the most part
Churches accumulated wealth for their own benefit — buying
property, building palaces and churches, commissioning religious
art, accumulating treasure, and so on. When Henry VIII's commissioners
visited the shrine of St Thomas Becket they found 4,994 ounces
of gold, 4,425 of silver-gilt, 5,286 of silver, and 26 cart-loads
of other treasure. This was only one of many such shrines around
Christendom at a time when people were dying in the streets
of starvation.
Most of the Church's income is still accumulated, spent on
clergymen, or used to build church buildings. Mainstream Churches
seem to find nothing incongruous in spending money on buildings
when it could be spent on the needy. The Roman Catholic Church
completed a new cathedral in Liverpool in 1979, as the local
population reeled under a collapsed economy. The Episcopal Church
in the USA completed a cathedral in 1990. It is sited in Washington
amidst a large underprivileged population. In the same year
Pope John Paul II consecrated a new basilica in a tiny bush
town in Côte d"Ivoire in Western Africa. It had cost
around US$200 million and had reputedly been financed from the
Ivorian President's personal fortune, although few doubted that
the money had actually come from national funds, so increasing
the country's huge external debt. The Pope did not express any
worry about the basilica, nor that the money spent could have
been used to save thousands of lives (all of the children in
the country could have been vaccinated against common killer
diseases for a fraction of the amount). His Holiness had, however,
entertained one worry during the construction of the building.
He had been concerned that this basilica should not be bigger
than St Peter's .
Apart from church buildings, all the main denominations are
still putting money into property, stocks and bonds, and other
investments. The Church of England has assets worth billions
of pounds. Following the global market crash in 2008, the Archbishops
of Canterbury and York criticised those who cashed in on falling
share prices as “bank robbers” and “asset
strippers”. A Christian group called Ekklesia promptly
pointed out that their own organisation, the Church of England,
had been profiting in exactly the way the archbishops were criticising,
and had been pursuing particularly aggressive targets for their
financial returns (a minimum return of 5 per cent each year
above the rate of inflation)*.
There is no knowing how much wealth the Roman Church acquired
over the centuries, because it is not accountable to anyone.
If it had not suffered so much corruption, the Church would
have accumulated many millions of billions of pounds of capital,
with a corresponding income, but in recent years it has claimed
to be making a substantial loss. How it can have collected and
squandered so much wealth, while every day for almost two millennia
people throughout Christendom have starved to death is a mystery
even to many of the faithful.
Today it is normal practice for churches to lock their doors
all year round while the destitute live and die on the streets.
Christians everywhere seem perfectly happy with this, just as
they are happy to see their leaders emulating Jesus by trading
fortunes on stock exchanges, and living in mansions (Low Church)
and palaces ( High Church).
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