Advertising panels with the message "Do not leave your money in the Lord's payment" appeared near the Palace of Parliament and the area where the "Cathedral of Salvation of the Nation" will be located. The Secular Humanist Association (ASUR) in Romania placed these panels as a protest against the church's exemption from income tax.
The Romanian Secular-Human Association (ASUR) protests against the non-taxation of the church with billboards. Romanians going through the Constitution Square can find out from these panels that there are 18,300 churches in Romania and only 4,700 general schools and 425 hospitals.
"In Romania, in the last 15 years, a new church has been inaugurated every two days, the bill being paid, to a significant extent, by the state budget or by the local budgets. In Romania, over the same period, because of insufficient budget allocated to the Ministry of Education, over 21,000 educational units were abolished - equivalent to the disappearance of four schools every day of each year! ", Says a statement in ASUR .
The representatives of the association sent an open letter to the authorities requesting the taxation of economic activities of denominations and restricting their financing from public money.
"In Romania, the tax base is expanded, so drugs, pensions, and meal vouchers are charged. In Romania, despite the desire to expand the tax base, religious cults, while offering numerous and diverse services, far outweigh the regular service of the job, carry out lucrative activities at their leisure, and significant sums escape IRS and fuel the underground economy, the ASUR representatives said
How much did the Nation's Salvation Cathedral cost, and how much money the state received
The Cathedral of Salvation of the Nation will be sanctified on Sunday by Patriarch Daniel and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople.
Although unfinished, the monumental work has swallowed huge amounts of money so far, and the total cost of the Cathedral remains a mystery.
"Be Light" journalists claim that a definitive balance sheet of state funding can not, of course, be done because they can not be quantified in different amounts of money, such as PUZs or technical documentation paid.
However, they have calculated all the public funds allocated to the cathedral over the last decade. BOR claims, in a response to Mediafax, that at the Nation's Cathedral, by November 2018, 110 million euros have been spent on VAT and 75% are public money.
This means that, after counting the Church, public money is about 83 million. The Lighting calculations - carried out on the public money line given by the Government, the City Hall and the Mayoralties of Sections 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 - show that the total amount granted by the Romanian State in the last decade exceeds the threshold of 121 million euros.
The government has contributed over 82 million euros. Capital City Hall with more than 18 million, the whole euro. Sectors 1, 2 and 5 with over € 6 million each.
Read: Patriarch Daniel: "Wealth is not bad. It comes from God "
"Let's be Light" journalists claim that the subsidy of the Cathedral is a much older reality, one that goes down to the mid-1990s and 1996s.
Then the first money from the state was allocated for the elaboration of preliminary studies and technical projects necessary for the construction of the BOR building: 200 million ROL.
BOR received support from PSD Governments in the project of this cathedral, and an interesting episode is related to Olguţa Vasilescu.
In 2007, Lia Olguţa Vasilescu (then PRM) proposed that half of the budget needed to build the Cathedral of Salvation to be covered by budgetary resources.
The initiative was promulgated without the word "half", but so, since the end of 2007, there is a law letter in Romania: the funds needed to build the Nation's Salvation Cathedral are provided by the Patriarchate, the Romanian Government and the local public authorities.
by MediaFilms