The question of whether faith-based organizations—churches and their non-profit affiliates—should accept taxpayers’ money has taken a sinister turn in Europe. In an interview with europeanconservative.com, Hungarian Ministerial Commissioner Bernadett Petri explains the “main difficulty in the relationship between the EU and traditional churches”:
although the EU is formally obliged to engage in dialogue with the churches under Article 17 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU [TFEU], in practice, this dialogue has been emptied of substance. Periodic meetings … have no real influence on policy design or on the distribution of funds.
Commissioner Petri outlines a trend in EU grant funding where churches have gradually been phased out as recipients, only to be replaced by secular non-government organizations, NGOs. However, the commissioner notes, it is not just any kind of NGO that is being favored. Under an increasingly “ideological and restrictive” interpretation of Article 2 of the TFEU, the Eurocracy exercises “systematic preference” in their grant making, prioritizing NGOs with progressive values over every other alternative—including churches.
Based on the EU’s own fiscal documentation, it is close to impossible to verify the size of the amounts paid out that churches could have been competing for. A thorough search of the EU’s latest Multiannual Financial Framework only adds to the informational obscurity: even in sections that pertain to relevant spending, there is no mention of NGOs or churches.
Equally lacking in specifics is the Statement of Expenditures—exemplified here by the Multinational Financial Framework for 2026—which reports caps on spending by chapter and, under each chapter, a number of clusters. However, it does not give further details or links to more precise information on how the aggregate funds are broken down under each spending item. Therefore, it is impossible to verify what amounts of money are subject to the discriminatory practices that Commissioner Petri points to.
The closest we get to detailed information on relevant spending is a cluster-by-cluster breakdown under section 2b, where Cluster 7 reports appropriations for “Investing in People, Social Cohesion and Values.” Of a total of €5.8 billion, a full 74%, or €4.3 billion, goes to Erasmus+, the EU program “to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe.”
Other items under the same cluster include “Employment and Social Innovation,” Citizens, Equality, Rights, and Value,” and “Justice.” At no point is it possible to determine what role, if any, faith-based organizations play in the implementation of these programs; the same applies to Erasmus+.
It is striking how devoid of relevant, detailed information all these documents are. This is a consistent trend in transparency across EU documentation, in particular when it comes to fiscal matters, where the European Union has one of the worst records that I have seen. I have studied, researched, and utilized public funding documents (including budget statistics) of both European and American governments for over 30 years.
Bluntly put, the EU’s fiscal documents are not written for outsiders to read for the purposes of EU accountability. They are written to pay a token gesture to openness while they in reality serve as declarations of policy intent. Therefore, the EU’s actual attitude toward churches is more easily tracked using independent sources.
To this point, back in 2017, the Catholic Commission of the Bishops’ Conference of the European Union, COMECE, pointed to some procedural problems with faith-based organizations accessing EU funds:
Complex administrative procedures, language barriers, short time-frames, cash-flow problems, as well as the difficulty for funding small-medium projects
It is possible that COMECE held back on its criticism of the EU’s grant-making bureaucracy in order not to make life more difficult for Catholic churches to obtain EU funds. With that said, their comment adds a new spotlight to Commissioner Petri’s aforementioned comment: the deliberate practices that put churches at a disadvantage come on top of an already convoluted, almost recalcitrant bureaucracy.
There is no doubt that the EU is becoming more and more politicized. We are a far cry from what the EU was originally created for, namely the furtherance of a free inner market where labor, capital, goods, and services could move freely between the member states. Since then, the EU has grown into exactly the supra-national bureaucracy that we, the EU critics, tried to explain in the Maastricht Treaty referenda across Europe.
Snarky treatment of faith-based organizations only reinforces the impression that the EU has become something it was not meant to be, and that it aspires to be even more of an antithesis of its own origin. Against this backdrop, Commissioner Petri’s comments about the blatant politicization of EU powers become a stark warning to all Europeans: given how much power and control over your lives that the EU already has, what are they going to do next?
One group that should ponder this question is actually the very churches that Commissioner Petri is concerned about. On the one hand, as long as the EU hands out grants to NGOs, churches should be granted the same access as other NGOs; on the other hand, why would churches want to apply for funding from a government that is hostile to them in the first place?
Commissioner Petri’s comment is, of course, meant to highlight the second point: the EU should not be politicized in general—and certainly not to the degree where it discriminates against churches. But her comments also convey the perils of faith-based organizations making themselves dependent on taxpayers’ money. A government that is friendly to them one year can become hostile the next. All it takes is for the ‘good guys’ to lose an election.
