This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Under Germany's church tax system, a legal arrangement dating to the Weimar Constitution and carried into the postwar Basic Law, registered Catholics have a portion of their income tax remitted to their diocese by the state tax administration itself, rather than relying on voluntary collections or a separate church run billing system the way most of the worldwide Catholic Church does. That arrangement gives the Catholic Church in Germany a funding base distinct from, and considerably more predictable than, the collection plate model familiar elsewhere in the Church.
The Catholic Church in Germany remains active today under that same system, organized nationally through the German Bishops' Conference and drawing a funding base from the state administered tax that has now persisted, with only the interruption of the Nazi period and its aftermath, across a full century of German constitutional history from the Weimar Republic through to the present Federal Republic. The Evangelical Church in Germany, the country's other major Christian body, draws on the identical state administered mechanism for its own Protestant congregations, so the two largest churches in Germany share a single funding structure that neither had to invent independently and that both continue to rely on today rather than any locally organized alternative.