Orthodox church appears to be exempt from austerity measures

Guardian
October 4, 2011

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.

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