The Prime Minister and leader of the ruling centre-right Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), Andrej Plenkovic, said the government was against any revisions of the treaties signed between Croatia and the Holy See in 1990s, after the HDZ MPs had on Wednesday rejected a motion by opposition parties suggesting that the agreements be reviewed.

“As far as our government is concerned, there will be no amendments to the treaties,” Plenkovic told the press after a meeting of the HDZ parliamentary group.

The five-member parliamentary group of the Civic and Liberal Alliance (Glas) and the Croatian Pensioners’ Party (HSU) put forward a motion to initiate a review of the treaties between Croatia and the Holy See. They demanded a review of all four agreements with the Holy See: on legal affairs, economic affairs, cooperation in education and culture, and spiritual guidance.

The Croatian government and the Holy See had signed four separate agreements, three in 1996 and one in 1998, obliging Croatia to include Catholic chaplaincy in the military and offer Catholic religious education in all primary and secondary schools.

Croatian courts also must notify the Church before investigating church officials for felonies. The agreements treat the Church as a charitable institution in the country, all donations are tax-free, and the government is required to pay a set sum per parish annually.

About 900 million kuna (€121 million) is annually allocated from the state budget for the purposes of the Catholic Church in Croatia, the groups said, adding that this amount was higher than the 2016 budgets of the ministries of foreign affairs and tourism combined.

No government has ever tried to revise the treaties.

“It is unacceptable that the (financing) model is currently determined by the number of parishes, which encourages the Church to establish new parishes even though there is no real need for that, given that the country’s population, including the number of believers, has been decreasing,” said the leader of the largest opposition Social Democratic Party, Davor Bernardic, on Wednesday.

The obligation to offer Catholic religious education in all public schools, as well as to take Christian ethics into account in the education system, is in direct opposition to Croatian Constitution, as well as the fundamental idea that a pluralist, civic society cannot be submitted to demands and sanctions of a religious group, the Glas and HSU groups said.

Hungary is the only country that allocated more money to the Church than Croatia, six times more than the EU average, said Glas MP, Anka Mrak-Taritas, adding that different countries have different models for Church financing – from Germany which has the so-called Church tax to the Netherlands where Church financing is on a voluntary basis.

HDZ MPs responded by saying that the data presented by the parties was not correct.

Croatian President, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, also commented on the motion on Wednesday, saying she was not in favour of the revision.

“In general I’m not in favour of revising bilateral contracts because it would set dangerous precedents in international law, unless both sides agree the contracts need to be amended due to some practical reason,” she said.

Commenting on the opposition’s claims that some other predominantly Catholic countries have different models of financing the Church, Prime Minister Plenkovic said: “Everyone chooses their own path.”

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