Page "Religion in Spain" Paragraph 23

Government financial aid to the Catholic Church was a difficult and contentious issue.

The Church argued that, in return for the subsidy, the state had received the social, health, and educational services of tens of thousands of priests and nuns who fulfilled vital functions that the state itself could not have performed at that time.

Nevertheless, the revised Concordat was supposed to replace direct state aid to the church with a scheme that would allow taxpayers to designate a certain portion of their taxes to be diverted directly to the Church.

Through 1985, taxpayers were allowed to deduct up to 10 percent from their taxable income for donations to the Catholic Church.

Partly because of the protests against this arrangement from representatives of Spain's other religious groups and even some from the catholic religion itself, the tax laws were changed in 2007 so that taxpayers could choose between giving 0. 52 percent of their income tax to the church and allocating it to the government's welfare and culture budgets.

For three years, the government would continue to give the Church a gradually reduced subsidy, but after that the church would have to subsist on its own resources.

The government would continue, however, its program of subsidizing Catholic schools, which in 1987 cost the Spanish taxpayers about US $ 300 million, exclusive of the salaries of teachers, which were paid directly by the Ministry of Education and Science.