12. Tax Morale and the Church: How Catholic Clergies Adapted Norms of Paying Taxes to Secular Institutions (1940s–1950s)

Paying taxes is a field of economic activity that has always been highly morally charged: the question of who pays how much or can avoid or evade the prescribed payments is always closely related to debate about a fair societal distribution of burdens. In the process of moralisation, therefore, faith communities such as the Catholic Church also repeatedly seized the floor to propagate certain norms. The article examines the contributions of theologians from Spain, the USA and West Germany in the 1940s and 1950s. It concludes that the norms of taxation they propagated differed greatly depending on the institutional and economic frameworks within which they operated. The analysis proves taxation to be a field of economic action and societal dispute where economics and morality are indissolubly interconnected.