Orthodox church appears to be exempt from Austerity Measures

Alain Salles
Guardian Weekly
4/10/2011

Property tax levied across Greece will not apply to the church, whose financial status is coming under closer scrutiny as debt crisis continues.

The Greek church and its monasteries will not have to pay the deeply unpopular property tax that the government introduced in September in an effort to fulfil Greece’s austerity targets. “The church will be taxed on any assets used for business purposes,” a finance ministry spokesman said after news of the tax caused an outcry.

Places of worship and charitable organisations will be exempt from the tax. But the borderline is fuzzy and the accounts of the Orthodox church are opaque. Church “institutions are governed by public law, which gives them substantial fiscal advantages. They must publish their accounts, but generally don’t,” says Isabelle Depret, a religious studies specialist at the Free University of Brussels.

Church funds are taboo in Greece. “Its income is liable to taxation, but there are two major stumbling blocks,” says Polikarpos Karamouzis, who is a professor of the sociology of religion at the Aegean University in Rhodes. “There is no accounting system to detail its actual income and no one really knows quite how much land it owns because there is no land register.” This situation suits both the church and the state, “because politicians are reluctant to upset the Orthodox authorities”, says Stefanos Manos, an independent MP and one of the few policymakers to have demanded separation of church and state.

“The Greek church is a national church,” Karamouzis says, “which means there is a political connection between the church and the state, for the state awarded it these privileges. Its spiritual role is closely linked to its political function, muddying the distinction between its congregation and Greek citizens, a source of confusion which politicians use in their quest for votes.”

Priests influence public opinion so politicians would rather not upset them. In 2010 the Holy Synod, a committee of 13 bishops, published a text circulated to all parishes condemning the “troika” – representatives of the International Monetary Fund, the European commission and the European Central Bank – as a “foreign occupation” force.

“The government takes lots of precautions before inventing taxes for the church or for shipowners, but workers and pensioners must pay up without anyone asking their opinion,” says the leader of the far-left party Syriza, Alexis Tsipras. He favours disestablishment.

The Orthodox church is a constituent part of the Greek nation: the constitution is written in “the name of the consubstantial and indivisible Holy Trinity”; priests bless the start of each school year and new governments; state schools teach Christian principles; and people of all ages make the sign of the cross when they pass a church.

In March 2010 the Socialist government of George Papandreou decided to tax the church, with a 20% levy on business revenue and 5% to 10% on donations. The 10,000 priests and bishops are paid by the state, which costs €220m ($295m) a year. The previous finance minister, George Papaconstantinou, tried to reduce the state’s share, but the moment news of this leaked, the government changed its mind. The present finance minister, Evangelos Venizelos, is close to the church and against the idea.

The public outcry when it emerged that the church would not be paying the property tax forced the church to publish details of how much tax it does pay. The church claims to have paid €2.5m in property and corporation tax for 2010; it mentioned that it owns 30 properties in Athens (six of them unoccupied) and 14 in Thessaloniki.

When the issue of church property is raised – as it increasingly is – the archbishop of Athens, Hieronymus – the supreme Orthodox authority in Greece – says that the church’s riches are a myth. Only 4% of the assets owned before the Greek revolution of 1821 remain, and the state has confiscated much of its property. “There is no comparison between the riches of the Greek church and those of its Italian or Spanish counterpart. Public buildings have been raised on church land, but it receives no compensation,” says the bishopric’s spokesman, Vassilios Meichanetsidis.

According to the right-of-centre daily Kathimerini newspaper, the church was worth €700m in 2008. Manos, a former finance minister, reckons the figure is at least €1bn. The €2.5m in tax paid is slight in comparison to these unconfirmed figures. But this is only part of what the church owns, in the care of the central administration. It does not take into account the many parishes, some of which are very rich, nor property under the direct ownership of Greece’s 80 bishoprics, which enjoy considerable independence. It also overlooks the wealth of 450 monasteries, some of which are affiliated to the church, others not (those on Mount Athos, for example, have a separate status). The Orthodox Patriarchs of Constantinople, Jerusalem and Alexandria all own property in Greece. “Greece is staring at a pile of money and everyone is behaving as if it was invisible,” says author Vassilis Alexakis, who has written a caustic novel about Mount Athos in French.

The church is the second-largest landowner in Greece, after the state, with about 130,000 hectares. “It’s forest, not building land,” Meichanetsidis says. But it includes blocks of flats in fashionable areas of Athens and seaside suburbs to the south.

The church holds a 1.5% share in the National Bank of Greece, with a seat on the board, occupied by the bishop of Ioannina, Theoklitos, who was paid €24,000 in fees in 2008, according to Forbes.com. He opposed an increase in church taxes. “We refuse to foot the bill for other people’s mistakes,” he said. Only two bishops have offered to give up their €2,200 salary.

Even undeveloped land has business potential. The monks of the richly endowed Pentelli monastery, north of Athens, are looking for investors prepared to put €1bn into a solar farm on their mountain side. This is part of the church’s new strategy of capitalising on its assets to fund charitable organisations. Last year it spent more than €100m on such operations, the scope of which has expanded with the financial crisis. “In Athens we are serving 10,000 to 12,000 meals a day,” says Meichanetsidis. This article originally appeared in Le Monde

Source: