Confessional money

As confessional money , confessional pfennig , sacrificial penny or confessional penny , one describes an originally voluntary gift that the confessor used to give to the priest .

Until 1031 the confessor was apparently free whether and how much he wanted to give. Then by tradition this gift became a fixed and oppressive tax which was later abolished in the Catholic Church, but partly renewed and partly retained in the Lutheran Church.

At the instigation of Calvin , confession money was abolished among the Reformed . The fact that this had not happened everywhere in the Lutheran churches up to the 19th century, despite multiple attempts, was due to the fact that there was no way to compensate the mostly low-paid clergy who had been paying on the confession money since ancient times as part of their pay were instructed.

In Prussia, confessional money was abolished as early as 1817; Today church employees in Germany are paid, among other things, from the proceeds of church tax. In many parts of the world, clergymen still finance their livelihoods through donations .

literature

• Alexander Wieckowski: Evangelical private confession and confessionals. Observations on an almost forgotten chapter in the Lutheran history of piety in Leipzig and the surrounding area . In: Markus Cottin, Detlef Döring , Cathrin Friedrich (eds.): City history. 2006 yearbook . Sax-Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-86729-503-1 , pp. 67-108
• Confessional money . In: Prussian Academy of Sciences (Hrsg.): German legal dictionary . tape 1 , issue 10 (edited by Eberhard von Künßberg ). Hermann Böhlaus successor, Weimar 1932 ( adw.uni-heidelberg.de ).