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Canon lawyer and journalist Ed Condon from pillarcatholic.com joins us to answer some hard questions about tithing. Is tithing required of every Christian? If so, is it just a tax? And if not, then what is required?
Is tithing just a Catholic tax? Ed Condon is next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett your host and a very happy Easter to you. Not many people attending parish services, at least in a relative sense this Easter and as a matter of fact, throughout the last year. This has raised concerns about whether parishes are going to survive, whether we’ll have the same number of parishes when all of this is over as we had at the beginning of all of this.
This brings up the question of our obligation to support Catholic parishes and other Catholic institutions. Often we’re asked the question, do I have to tithe as a Catholic? Tithing, being the idea that you give 10%, as a matter of fact, tithing coming from the word for a 10th.
Do we have to tithe? They certainly did In the Old Testament. Is there a New Testament requirement for tithing? We asked the guy who would know, a canon lawyer and a journalist, Ed Condon has worked as the DC editor for the Catholic News Agency and associated editor for The Catholic Herald and he’s written for all kinds of great publications, National Review, First Things, and many, many more. Now, he’s one of the founders of The Pillar, you can find it at pillarcatholic.com. What do they do there? They report on the Catholic church. So we asked Ed, as both a Catholic reporter and as a canon lawyer, do we have to give 10%?
Ed Condon, thank you very, very much for being with us on Catholic Answers Focus.
Ed Condon:
I’m really happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Cy Kellett:
And today more in your capacity as a canon lawyer than as a journalist, I think I don’t know which skills you’ll be drawing on, but I think more in the capacity of a canon lawyer. So the question is about tithing, and we actually get a lot of questions about tithing here at Catholic Answers. I’m going to give you one from a listener named Jessica. “What are the church’s teachings on tithing, and does Catholic education tuition count towards tithing?” Maybe we could just start with what are the churches teaching, just to help Jessica and everybody else out, what does the church say about tithing?
Ed Condon:
Sure. Speaking broadly about the obligation on all Catholics to give money to the church freely, we do have to. It’s a rule, not to put too fine a point on it. It’s actually a law, there’s a legal obligation in all Catholics to give the church that which the church needs to carry out its essential mission, which is to provide for divine worship to support the decent support oof ministers, the clergy, and also to provide for sort of Catholic charity. Not in the sense of the be official organ of Catholic charity, but the apostolic work of charity, which is something that is part of the church’s essential mission and function.
So all of these things are essential parts of the church’s mission. And we, as members of the lay faithful, are obliged to participate in them and to make sure the church can do her job. This is our obligation. It’s funny, you asked me as a lawyer, so now of course I have to give both sides of the answer. Lawyers can never stop talking [crosstalk 00:03:06].
Cy Kellett:
Exactly, okay. It’s funny Ed, because I assume there’s another side because in preparation for this, I went to certain parish websites and literally, Catholic parishes are saying exact opposite things about it this. One parish you’ll go to and it’ll say, “Tithing, yes, you absolutely must tithe. And the other parish, “No, tithing is not a New Testament requirement.” So I assume that you can resolve that for us as a lawyer. So the other side of this is so on the one hand, you have a legal obligation to support the work of the church, on the other lawyer hand?
Ed Condon:
On the other lawyer hand, no one is obliged to do what they cannot. If you don’t have a whole lot of disposable income, the church can’t put a dollar amount on it for you. The church doesn’t say, “You owe us 15% of your pre-tax income, pay up.” Actually, it does in Germany, but that’s 15%. Germany’s the only place I know of where they actually put a percentage figure on it and mandated and you get in trouble if you don’t meet it. But actually Rome’s told them they can’t do that and they do it anyway but that’s a whole nother story.
But no, generally speaking, you have the obligation to support the church in her essential ministry and her essential work, how well you are able to do that is a matter of very much for a Catholic’s own conscience. Now, while we have the obligation as members of the faithful to support the church, the church also has the right to make certain demands of us. At the level of the diocese, the bishop has the right to require from the faithful that which is necessary for the church to carry out his mission.
Now again, how you put a dollar figure on that can change in place to place. What is essential, I think there’s certainly some room to debate, but I’d say that the final decision of what is essential is really that’s what the diocesan bishop is there to decide. But again, there is this idea of, it’s a right, and it’s an obligation, that we’re all part of the church and that we as different members of the church, with different roles and different functions, have different ways in which that’s expressed.
Now, the bishop can actually tax people, well, he can text people in the sense that he can tax juridic persons, what we might think of as the canon law equivalent of corporations, a legal [inaudible 00:05:18]. So parishes, Catholic schools, any sort of Catholic enterprise going in the diocese, they’re a juridic person under the bishop’s authority and he has the ability and the legal right to impose a tax on them to support the essential work of the church in the diocese. Now, how far he can go with that, the tax has to be moderate and proportionate to income. So it can’t be, a sort of soak the rich, I think this particular group is riding very high on the hob right now so I’m just going to say, “You know what, I’d like 25% of your take this year.” That wouldn’t necessarily be considered either moderate or proportionate to income, and certainly not just across the board.
Now, what the bishop cannot do is say, “Every Catholic in my diocese is going to give me … ” again to take us sort of figure at random, “20% of their post-tax revenue for their household and they’re going to give it to the Bishop’s Appeal. The bishop can make appeals in the diocese and Catholics are according to the law to give support to the church by responding to appeal. So there is this sort of give and take, but again, how we respond to those appeals is a matter for our own prudential judgment in most cases.
Cy Kellett:
So does this include lay apostolates then? Could could the bishop put a tax on lay apostate
Ed Condon:
Sure.
Cy Kellett:
I have a personal interest in this one, speaking to you from ground zero of a lay apostolate right now, he could tax us?
Ed Condon:
If you were a public juridic person in canon law, that is to say if you’ve been recognized by the Catholic hierarchy as a Catholic organization-
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, we are.
Ed Condon:
… then yeah, absolutely. Then absolutely.
Cy Kellett:
Maybe don’t mention this to our bishop, Ed.
Ed Condon:
I’ll try and keep it quiet for you.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, thank you. I appreciate that. So Jessica then, to get back to Jessica’s question, because the second part was she’s paying tuition at Catholic schools, so this would seem to fit into your qualification that you can’t do more than you can do. So maybe she’s completely taxed just sending her kids to a Catholic school?
Ed Condon:
Well, sending your kids to a Catholic school is a good, a noble thing to do for sure. That definitely places a strain on family budgets, which, would that we still lived in an era where Catholic education was in every parish and for free. So that’s definitely a strain on the household income. I wouldn’t say it’s not the same thing as the obligation to support the church in her essential ministries in all things. Because again, what I was saying is what the church constitutes as its essential ministries that we as members of the lay faithful are obligated to support, are divine worship, epistolic charity, and the decent support of the clergy. Now, none of those three boxes is particularly being ticked by tuition at your local Catholic school. Which again, it’s not to say that it’s not a good and noble thing to do and a real claim on your finances. That doesn’t create a difficulty in funding other kinds of endeavors. So I wouldn’t say that yeah, if you’re paying tuition at a Catholic school, you’re satisfying your obligation, but how that paying of Catholic tuition leaves your family finances is going to inform how generous you can be in other ways, for sure.
Cy Kellett:
So what about the parish who says, it actually says this on some websites, the 10% tithe from the Old Testament is binding on the Catholic person. I would like to address that specific claim.
Ed Condon:
Well, I’m a canon lawyer and I’ve done quite a lot of canon lawyering, and I can tell you nowhere in the code does it say the Catholics are obligated in a way to pay 10% of their income pre or post-tax to their local parish. That’s just not a law. So, there is a very praiseworthy history, and if you like, a kind of quote, unquote moral claim on our incumbent, 10% certainly has a certain theological and scriptural basis. So I think when we talk about tithing, it’s helpful to think about the idea of tithing as saying, “Hey, I end up with X or Y number of dollars from my disposable income at the end of the month, there should be a percentage of that, which I’m comfortable saying I need to give this back to God. I need to give this back to the church,” for sure. But as for that being a legal obligation, it’s just not true.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so what about my moral obligation to support the church? I’m a member of a parish, but I also have within the parish boundaries, there’s a Benedictine monastery, there’s some priests who are ministering to military families, there’s an outreach to the homeless. How am I supposed to divide up my funds? Is it all supposed to go to the parish, or am I satisfying the law that says I have to support the work of the church if I’m supporting these other things as well?
Ed Condon:
Well, certainly supporting the work of the church in its essential ministries can be all of those things that you just mentioned, but our local parish can and should have a particular claim, if not be first in mind for our generosity if for no other reason than we, as Catholics, should never think of the parish as this thing that I give money to. We are the parish, the parish as defined in the law of the church is a portion of the people of God in a given territory. The parish is not a building, the parish is not, if you like, a business. It’s not an organizational structure. It’s not the parish priest, the pastor and his secretarial staff. When we say we are the parish, it’s not a sort of fluffy, spirit of Vatican II kind of sloganeering. The legal definition is, the people is the parish.
So to say, “Well, I’m going to skip out on supporting my local parish,” which by the way is where we worship, where we have [inaudible 00:11:07] charity, are the clergy that we have first and primary interest in making sure are decently supported. If we skip out on that and say, “Well, I want to only focus on other apostolates, other ministries that I know are present in the local area.” I mean, that’s fine. It’s not to say those aren’t very important and very praiseworthy ministries, but you’re robbing your own family in that sense to fund these other things exclusively.
Cy Kellett:
Some people want to rob their own family in a sense now, because they’re mad about the way their parish dealt with the sex abuse scandals, or the way their diocese did. In many cases, it might not be the current bishop, but the history is just bad and they’re angry. So let me give you an example of someone that I know was so angry at the way his diocese dealt with the sex abuse scandal and the current bishop in that diocese, he just said, “I know I have an obligation to support the church. I’m not supporting this local church,” and he found a bishop that he liked that bishop’s response and gave his money to that bishop. That seems problematic to me in some ways, but I wonder what you think of that as a canon lawyer?
Ed Condon:
Well, for sure it is problematic in one way particularly, which is your bishop is the one to whom we are a member of his church. That’s the particular church that we live in, you can’t diocese shop, you live in a diocese. That’s your diocese, that’s your bishop. That’s the one who has a right over you and that’s the one to whom you have an obligation. So that link is not theoretical and it’s certainly not something we can just transfer at will. I understand very well and sympathize with the frustration many Catholics have in, not just how some diocese have dealt with the sexual abuse crisis, but also how the church deals with money in general. A lot of the reporting that I do and have done for the last several years has involved financial affairs, both in different dioceses in the US and also even at the Vatican.
There’s a lot there to be frustrated with, but I think it’s worth remembering, when people are thinking about saying, “Well, I don’t want to give to my local parish and I don’t want to give to my bishop or my diocesan appeal because of how they’ve responded to these things in the past,” it’s worth, I think, remembering just as a practical concern, leaving aside the spiritual communion that we need to maintain with our local church, but even as a practical concern, if the diocese can’t pay its bills, if the diocese doesn’t have the money, it’s not that the bishop is suddenly going to lose his house or lose his car. The first things that are going to get cut are usually charitable giving by the diocese, Catholic education, lay apostolate outreaches, and the decent support of clergy. A lot of diocese in this country have massive unfunded pension liabilities that are there for one reason only, and that’s to make sure that retired priests can eat and have somewhere to live, you know?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right.
Ed Condon:
Those are the things that our money is going to first and foremost and if we say, “Well, we’re just not going to give it to our local church.” We have to consider, well, who are we hurting here? Whose nose are we cutting off?
Cy Kellett:
Okay, but if I have the obligation to support the church, what is the church’s obligation to be transparent in its finances? I mean, I know I’m speaking to Ed Condon, the guy that reports on this kind of stuff, but isn’t there a law that every parish is supposed to have a finance council? I know that they don’t. Every bishop is supposed to have an independent finance council, and I know that that’s often proforma, so what’s the obligation on the other side?
Ed Condon:
Sure, there are lots of legal obligations like this, and you’re right, a parish finance council is something that is the law in many diocese. A diocesan finance council with a certain level of independence and credibility is a requirement of the law. If these things aren’t being done well, we’re part of a society. If we see something that we don’t like, we can say something. Now I, as a journalist, and often as just a Catholic [inaudible 00:14:59] wish that there was such a thing as this Catholic [inaudible 00:15:02] law, that we could drag transparency out of diocesan chanceries or Roman curial departments, just by filling in a form. That would be in many respects wonderful, and made my job very easy.
It’s not necessarily the case, the bishops do have a very serious set of moral responsibilities in how they steward the goods of the church. And if we see them being abused or not being used properly, for sure that’s something we can raise and Catholics have a legal right in canon law to make known their opinion on matters that they have a stake in, including matters of church governance. That it’s not a question that we have to just sit there quietly and pay, pray, and obey, that we’re all living members of the same body of Christ. It’s absolutely appropriate for the Catholics to make representations. I qualify here and say, respectful and hopefully constructively, to their bishop and to their diocese about things that they think can and should be done better.
Cy Kellett:
So, would you classify our support of the church as a matter of justice, or a matter of charity? Or is it justice up to a certain level and if you keep going, then it’s charity?
Ed Condon:
I’d say it’s both justice and charity. I like to think that justice properly done is an act of charity. This is something I come across in legal practice all the time, is the idea of we have justice and we have mercy and love is somewhere in between and, you know, what do we call these three separate concepts?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Ed Condon:
I don’t know that you could really separate them, or at least not in the Catholic mind can you separate them, that justice, equity, fair dealing is an expression of love. It’s a way in which we acknowledge that we live together as a family and we have certain mutual rights and obligations to each other. I think charity is something else, which is a particular expression of love. The church does need to do that and we as individual Catholics need to live that too.
You know, it’s funny, one of the … When we’re talking about the decent support of clergy, I know a lot of diocesan priests who joke that that’s three hots and a cot, is basically what you’re owed and that’s oftentimes all you get. But actually what qualifies as the decent support of clergy is they’re supposed to be paid enough that they have enough disposable income themselves, that they can fulfill their personal obligations to charity. But if you’re not paying someone enough that they can give to charity freely themselves, then that’s not really a decent wage.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. Well, I appreciate all of this and I just realized with my question about accountability at the parish and diocesan level, and I suppose that goes all the way up, to the Vatican, one way you can assure that is supporting The Pillar because you guys are doing great work on that in that regard.
Ed Condon:
Well, thank you. I like to think that we’re trying very hard to be a pillar of transparency and accountability, but faithfully so, respectfully so, and out of love for the church. By all means we don’t have an adversarial relationship with the church at all. I would want to make absolutely clear for the avoidance of any doubt, subscribing to The Pillar, which you absolutely can do at pillarcatholic.com and I’d love it if you did, but that fulfills exactly none of your obligations for the church in terms of charity, divine worship, or decent support of clergy. We are a business, we are not at an apostolate of the church in any official way, and we are certainly not a charity. So if you think good Catholic journalism’s worth paying for, please by all means subscribe, but don’t think that that takes care of your obligation to support the church.
Cy Kellett:
Well, I’ll tell you why I subscribe Ed, I think light is a curative in many ways, and that in some ways it’s also just a curative for a generalized suspicion. Like, I don’t know what those bishops are up to, I don’t know what they’re doing at the money, so I get a little bit miserly with the money. Reporting positive and negative is curative of maybe a sense of suspicion that we might have, because we can have clear things we say, “Well okay, that was wrong,” but we can also see that in general, the church is very, very much worth supporting.
Ed Condon:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think it was Christ who said, “Everything that is done in the dark must be brought to the light.” This is a natural part of a Christian worldview, is to say, “Hang on. Things done badly in secret have to be dragged out, that there has to be this kind of accountability.” Now there are ways of doing it that I think are more or some are less constructive and hopefully we’re doing it in a constructive way, but for sure, I think that there is … As you say, it’s a trust building exercise as well, that after what has been really 20 years of scandal for the church, particularly in the United States, there needs to be this effort to rebuild trust with the faithful. Part of that is saying, “Look, here’s what we’re doing and there’s nothing to hide. There’s nothing here that can’t be explained.”
I think bringing that into the daily life of the church and the experience of Catholics in their relationship to the hierarchical institutional structure of the church, doesn’t have to be an adversarial exercise. I think it can be a very healthy one. I think it could be one that really helps rebuild the kind of bonds that we need to have with our local church, whether it’s at the parish level, the diocesan level. I think all of that can be very helpful.
Cy Kellett:
Praise God for all of it. Ed Condon, thanks. I really appreciate it.
Ed Condon:
No, absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Cy Kellett:
I really like the fact that on a completely unrelated topic, you still bring in the German bishops.
Ed Condon:
Wherever there is money in the church, the German bishops are always related, I will stand by that. That’s a broad brush I’m happy to paint with.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, you can read Ed’s reporting on the German bishops, on the Vatican finances, and on many, many things at pillarcatholic.com and do subscribe because light is a curative. Thanks again, Ed Condon.
Ed Condon:
Thank you so much for having me.
Cy Kellett:
It can be a little bit jarring to have words like taxes thrown around when you’re talking about the church, but the material support of the church is a very serious matter, one that more than anything else we’re invited to. God invites us to participate in His saving work, and we have to always remember that. It’s an invitation primarily, to participate in this work, one that he will not leave unrewarded. We are confident of that. So the Lord loves a generous giver and it’s important for us to be generous. I still don’t want our bishop to hear that he’s allowed to tax us though, please do not mention that to him. Ed Condon, pillarcatholic.com. That’s where you can find more of Ed’s work, pillarcatholic.com. If you want to get in touch with us, just send us an email focus@catholic.com is our email address, focusatcatholic.com.
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