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The European Union’s highest court ruled Tuesday that a German Catholic association was wrong to fire an employee solely because she had formally left the Church.
The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled March 17 that the Katholische Schwangerschaftsberatung, a pregnancy counselling service, had discriminated against the woman because it also employed non-Catholics, who were able to provide counselling according to a Catholic ethos despite not being Church members.
The case raises sensitive issues in the Catholic Church in Germany — one of the country’s largest employers — about disaffiliation as the grounds for dismissal and how the country’s church tax is levied on families.
The European Court of Justice case was triggered when the Diocese of Limburg requested that the complainant, identified only as JB, pay a levy in addition to Germany’s mandatory church tax. The reason for the additional levy was that she is in an interfaith marriage with a high-earning spouse.
In the Limburg diocese, JB would have paid a standard 9% on her own income tax as church tax. According to court documents, the family was also required to pay the additional levy based on joint assessed
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