Across Continental Europe we find a mixed pattern of the churches’ relationship to the State: established churches, disestablished churches and various half-way houses.[1] Things are not always what they seem. In France, with its modern anticlerical tradition, the Napoleonic Concordat with the Holy See was abrogated in 1905, but the constitution still acknowledges ‘the Supreme Being’ of the Enlightenment. Roman Catholic churches built before then are owned and maintained by the municipal authority. In Germany, where the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches have been ‘disestablished’ since 1919, the constitution speaks of ‘responsibility before God’. There are numerous concordats or other treaties between the churches and either the Federal government or the Bundesländer; there is a guaranteed public role for the churches; a voluntary church tax administered by the state; and confessional theological faculties in state universities. In Belgium there is a paradoxical combination of state-sponsored pluralism and multiple establishment, as the salaries, housing and pensions of the ministers of various churches (and of some non-Christian faiths) are provided by the state, and as the state maintains church buildings.
Denmark offers the strongest form of establishment in Europe: the Lutheran Church of Denmark has no legislative machinery apart from that of the Danish parliament; the government minister responsible has considerable authority; and parish councils are the most local tier of church government. Nevertheless, the Danish church elects its own bishops. The Church of Sweden, which until recently was the spiritual expression of the Swedish nation, has renegotiated its relationship to the state, gaining freedom in managing its affairs and electing its bishops, but retaining state recognition as the national church in the constitution, with the monarch as its first member, a church tax (that all churches may use) administered by the state, and certain legal obligations, especially in relation to funerals and burial grounds. The state subsidises religious newspapers. It may therefore fairly be said to remain an established church. In Finland, as mentioned above, both the Lutheran and the Orthodox forms of Christianity are established. In Norway discussions have been taking place about changes to establishment. The question suggests itself, in relation to the current flux in church-state relations in parts of Europe, whether the pressure for change is driven by a sense of injustice towards minority churches, by a vision of more effective gospel mission, or by a politically correct pluralist and relativist ideology? [1] See Gerhard Robbers (ed.), State and Church in the European Union (Baden Baden: Nomos Gesellschaft, 1996); Gerhard Robbers, ‘Diversity of State-Religion Relations and European Union Unity’, Ecclesiastical Law Journal, 7 [no. 34] (2004), 304-316; B. Schanda, ‘Church and State in the New Member Countries of the European Union’, Ecclesiastical Law Journal 8 (2005), 186-198.
