From the 2026 budget audit
300 million Ft for one denomination's Metropolitanate — from everyone's tax
The Greek Catholic Metropolitanate receives 300 million Ft for its operation and investments — a denomination-specific operational grant that phases out over four years as the church rebuilds its voluntary funding base.
About 75 Ft per taxpayer per year for the operating and capital costs of one denomination's central institution.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: the Greek Catholic Church's Metropolitanate — its central institutional costs, administration, and investment — funded partly from the state budget. The unseen: the non-Greek-Catholic taxpayer whose contribution covers the overhead of a denomination they do not belong to, whose members could sustain the institution through their own offering and the SZJA 1% designation.
Objection
"The Greek Catholic Church is a smaller denomination that lacks the financial base of the Roman Catholic Church — it needs support to maintain its institutional capacity."
Answer
The relative size of a denomination is an argument for its members giving more, not for non-members being taxed to compensate. The four-year phase-out is generous precisely because the Metropolitanate's members have time to build a sustainable offering-based funding model. The voluntary designation channel remains intact; the reform removes only the involuntary supplement to it.
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The analyst's verdict
Support for Operation and Investments of the Greek Catholic Metropolitanate
Rationale
Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The seen here is a funded parish, a renovated church building, a supplemented clergy income. The unseen is the wage-earner — of any faith or none — whose SZJA was routed to a religious institution they may not belong to and did not choose.
Transition mechanism
The Metropolitanate line phases over four years. A four-year linear glide gives the Metropolitanate time to rebuild offering-based and membership-based funding and to absorb the SZJA-designation revenue that remains entirely intact. Across the cluster, the SZJA 1% church designation — the genuinely voluntary channel — is untouched and becomes the primary funding route.
Affected groups
The Greek Catholic Metropolitanate and its institutions, who transition from state grant to offering-and-membership funding plus the intact 1% designation. No believer loses the right to practise or to fund their church; the reform removes the involuntary contribution of non-members, not the voluntary contribution of members.
Free Society Institute
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