State-Church Relations - an analysis of selected agreements between the Roman Catholic Church and European States: description
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Prof. Dr. Elmar Güthoff
Alongside state norms relating to religion the common agreements between individual states and the churches are also part of state-church relations. A large number of these treaties and concordats with the Roman Catholic Church were signed under the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. There are two reasons why so many were signed during this time:
● After the promulgation of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, a lot of
countries`laws dealing with state-Church relations had to be brought in line
with the universal church law of the Latin-rite Church.
● The political changes which took place at the beginning of the 1990s made
the signing of Church-state agreements necesssary.
After German unity was restored, it was particularly necessary for the Church to sign treaties with Saxony, Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg and Bremen; these are to be analysed within the scope of this five-day-seminar.
In order to understand these more recent agreements correctly however, it is essential to know about the older Church-state agreements, namely the concordats and treaties between the Roman Catholic Church and the states of Bavaria, Prussia, Baden and the German Reich as well as those with Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia. It will also be the task of the seminar to analyse these agreements.
For the sake of comparison, agreements with the other states (e.g. the accordo with Italy and the concordat with Poland etc) will also be examinated.
Literature: Handbuch des Staatskirchenrechts der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, edited by Joseph Listl and Dietrich Pirson, 2 vol., Berlin 21995; Axel von Campenhausen, Staatskirchenrecht, München 31996; José T. Martín de Agar, Raccolta di Concordati 1950-1999, Città del Vaticano 2000. 
