Practicing what we teach: a call for progressive church taxes

TAXES AND TAX COLLECTORS have been around in one form or another for most of human history. Tax collectors appear in many of the Gospel stories, and the Evangelist Matthew was himself a tax man. Many American Catholics may not realize it, but their bishops are often tax collectors too, regularly levying tariffs on the parishes of their dioceses.

Canon law allows the diocesan bishop to impose taxes, sometimes called diocesan assessments, quotas, mandatory targets or fees, on parishes. Although dioceses in the United States increasingly rely upon voluntary annual appeals, a survey in 2001 by the Diocese of Great ...