“This will be a drastic change – we depend on financial support, and there’ll be no chance of obtaining it if the new law goes ahead,” said Markus Meidert, president of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Liechtenstein, a 62 square-mile Alpine principality that joined the United Nations only in 1990.
“This is a predominantly Catholic country, and the Catholic Church is unhappy with the plans as well. But the new law will be especially hard and treacherous for smaller churches like ours, who have none of the Catholic church’s resources.”
Meidert was reacting to a reform package and Religion Act before Liechtenstein’s 25-member Landtag, or parliament, that will end the Roman Catholic Church’s status as official denomination and withdraw state subsidies from recognized religious communities.
In an ENInews interview on June 28, he said state grants accounted for half the current budget of the Evangelical Lutheran church, which had no means of generating income like Christian churches in neighboring Germany and Austria.
“Whereas virtually everyone used to be Catholics here, and the religious and political communities were one and the same, a third of Liechtenstein’s inhabitants now come from abroad – so supporters of these reforms say the situation has changed and we now need to move away from just being a tiny, isolated principality,” Meidert said.
“But it’s clear that, among the cluster of reasons cited for this change, saving money features prominently. These proposals have been around for some time, and the final push to have them enacted could come very soon.”
The Roman Catholic church accounts for 78 percent of the 36,000 inhabitants of Liechtenstein, situated between Austria and Switzerland, and receives 300,000 Swiss francs yearly from the state budget, as well as additional funds from the 11 municipalities of the principality, which gained sovereignty in the early 19th century after forming part of the Holy Roman Empire.
However, the territory is also home to 18 other religious associations besides Evangelical Lutherans, who made up 8 percent of the population in a 2000 census, and calls for an easing of church-state links have been backed by Crown Prince Alois III, who assumed day-to-day state affairs in 2004 from his father, Prince Hans-Adam II.
Under the government-sponsored reform package, the Roman Catholic Church would lose its status as “state church” with “full protection from the State,” set out in Liechtenstein’s 2003 constitution, as part of a restructuring of civil ecclesiastical law.
The church’s guaranteed role in education and provision of religious teaching in schools will also be ended by the package, which will also restrict state financial support and benefits to services performed by churches for the collective good.
The proposed changes were condemned in a June 10 open letter to government and parliament members by Markus Walser, vicar-general of the Roman Catholic Church’s Vaduz archdiocese, who said the proposed package was “totally unconvincing” and had failed to consider “the wishes of the Catholic Church.”
He added that the church was not “seeking a privileged position or special status” in Liechtenstein, where proposed bills to legalize abortion and same-sex partnerships have also faced strong church criticism, but said Archbishop Wolfgang Haas, the church’s leader, would refuse to celebrate a traditional National Day Mass on August 15, in protest against government moves.
“Church-state separation should be regulated by a concordat and equivalent agreements with religious communities,” Walser wrote. In an interview with ENInews, Walser said he had received no reactions to his letter. However, Markus Meidert said the archbishop’s decision to boycott the Mass had “caused quite a stir” and would have “symbolic importance” for inhabitants of Liechtenstein.
