In their annual report the Episcopal Council came to the conclusion that the Catholic Church saves the State some 4,091m euros a year in education alone.

Spain has 2,635 church-run schools, which translates into 59,416 classrooms, 1.4m pupils and 97,435 teachers. Of those 2,635 schools 253 of them are special-needs ones, catering for 3, 837 pupils.

To these figures we can add 14 Catholic universities that cater for 78,471 students. This represents 64% of the students studying at privately run universities.

The Vice-Secretary for Economic Affairs for the Council of Bishops, Fernando Giménez Barriocanal, explained that each one of those university students costs the Church 2,000 euros, which is around half the cost that a student costs at a state-run university.

Referring to the money given to the Church by taxpayers via their tax declarations, he explained that for the tax year of 2011 the Church received 7.4m donations in their favour. In other words, 7.4m taxpayers ticked the box to allow the Government to hand over 0.7% of their tax to the Church. The Vice-Secretary pointed out that this figure was nearly 98,000 donations down on the previous year. The total amount handed over by the Government for 2011 was 247.9m euros.

The approximately 248m euros represents 25% of the total income of the Spanish Catholic Church.

So how many people are employed by the Church? The answer is 19,621 priests and 59,882 belonging to religious orders (monks, nuns etc). There are also 85,751 Sunday-school teachers (Catequistas), all distributed around 22,842 parishes.

Neither can we forget that the Church has 7,743 centres, such as residences for the elderly, hospitals, shelters for the homeless etc, which attend to 4.3m people, all in all.

Taking all these services provided by the Church, they consider that if they were charged according to the normal work market, it would cost the state 1,957m euros a year, whereas what it actually cost the Church was 818m euros. “Every euro invested in the Church is equivalent to 2.39 euros on the open market,” says the report.

Furthermore, the Church spent 302m euros through its charities Cáritas and Manos Unidas.

And all this has something to do, as mentioned in the report, with whether the Church has a ‘privileged tax’ position, which the report denied. The report was highly critical of the Town Hall of Soria which want to charge property tax on the 18 buildings belonging to the Church within its municipality – only the Parliament has the authority to decide such a thing, it argues.

(News: Spain)