The Pocketbook Nerve

U.S. churches, which own some of the choicest blocks of tax-free real estate in the country, feel a cold chill coursing along the pocketbook nerve. The Louisville City Council plans to place all church-owned real estate used for business purposes on the tax rolls. Several million dollars' worth of property, owned mostly by Baptists and Roman Catholics, will be affected. The owners will have to go to court if they wish to protest the assessments.

Meanwhile many a U.S. churchman also keeps an anxious eye on Washington. Five times in the last year the District of Columbia, holding that "religious institutions enjoy no inherent exemption from taxation," has returned church property to the tax rolls. Last week Monsignor Michael J. Ready, general secretary of the National Catholic Welfare Conference (voice of the Roman Catholic hierarchy), put ecclesiastical fears into words: "What the District of Columbia' now provides in its tax laws will be precedent-setting all over the country."

Occasion for Monsignor Ready's remarks was a Senate committee hearing on a bill introduced by Nevada's Pat McCarran to exempt about half the Washington religious property recently returned to the tax rolls. The McCarran bill would exempt only schools and churches, leaving other educational and religious institutions a target for taxes.

Among the groups affected in the District of Columbia: the National Cathedral (Episcopal), the Washington Federation of Churches (interdenominational Protestant), a Christian Science church, numerous Roman Catholic properties, including those of 13 Catholic orders. Here the issue is not merely one of taxing church-owned properties that are used for commercial activities. The reasons given for taxing them have been that the land owned by certain religious institutions is in "excess" of their needs, that a Franciscan monastery is not actually used as a church (though daily Masses open to the public are said in it), that other properties (including seminaries) are not entitled to exemption as educational institutions.

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