Our View: Time to end the plundering of state coffers by the Church

Sixty-four years after independence and 20 years as an EU member-state, the Cyprus Republic still remains in the clutches of the Church. This is a legacy of Archbishop Makarios that no politician has ever dared to touch.

Protocol puts the archbishop close to the top of the state hierarchy and he is regularly visited by foreign dignitaries while he is a leading guest of official functions. Worse still, there is a tradition of presidents consulting the archbishop and seeking his approval before appointing an education minister, despite the Republic supposedly being a secular state.

We were reminded of the church-state relationship, bequeathed by Makarios, earlier this week when the state subsidy of the church payroll was in the news. Next year, the government will contribute €9m towards the wages of priests. This state subsidy is nothing new. It has been in place for more than 50 years, imposed in 1971 by Makarios as head of the church and state, which he treated as his personal property.

At the time Makarios, decided that the taxpayer should cover a part of clerics’ wages and in exchange he granted church-owned land to the state. This was a trick to justify a grossly unfair agreement. What rational person or business would undertake to carry on paying a for an asset indefinitely, with the payment increasing every year? To add to the absurdity of the deal, three quarters of the land is now in occupied territory, although not even Makarios knew that most of the land he ‘sold’ the state would be worthless after 1974.

The money is paid directly to the Church which then pays priests based in so-called rural areas, €681 per month. Some 850 priests are entitled to this payment which somehow also includes CoLA. Why the taxpayer has to cover even part of the payroll of the island’s wealthiest landowner with a big range of business interests, nobody knows, and no politician dares to stop. Nobody is willing to cut the state funding of the church, which also receives a VAT refund every year amounting to about €2.5m.

This is another scam – the state refunds VAT paid by the Church on building work related to the upkeep of premises “used for the carrying out of its religious work.” So, when it builds a new church, the VAT paid for construction materials, contractors is returned. It is just another sneaky way of government using the taxpayer’s money to subsidise the church, which, incidentally, in terms of assets, is the wealthiest organisation on the island.

For how much longer will these subsidy schemes carry on? It is time to end this annual plundering of the state by the Church. We have moved on from the Makarios years when the archbishop was also president and believed he owned the state and could use its funds and resources in whichever way he chose to. We are in 2024 and there can be no better time than now for the state to cut all funding of the Church.