Home›Europe›Modern AreaBrowse ByModern AreaThis page groups sacred regions by the present-day country or countries they actually fall inside. Wikipedia notes that the Holy Land "today ... chiefly overlaps with the combined areas of Israel and parts of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and Palestine." Browsing by modern-area lets a visitor find every sacred region that falls inside the same present-day country.FactsModern AreaSourcesComments (0)Reader Challenges (0)FactsDirectoryCategoryWell-attestedRegions 1Modern AreaFilter Results3 entriesApostasy or Blasphemy LawAllGermany criminalizes religious defamation, not personal insult to a deity, under Section 166 of the Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch), which punishes publicly or through media defaming the religion or ideology of others, or a church or other religious or ideological association within Germany, its institutions or its customs, in a manner capable of disturbing the public peace, with a fine or up to three years' imprisonment. A 1969 reform narrowed the article so that insulting God or a prophet directly is no longer, by itself, punishable; the disturbance-of-public-peace element is now the operative test. Germany has no apostasy statute. Enforcement is rare relative to the maximum penalty: 25 criminal cases were adjudicated under Section 166 in 2013, the most recent year for which the campaign source reports a figure, producing 12 convictions and, in turn, one suspended prison sentence and 11 fines, a pattern German secularist groups including the Giordano Bruno Foundation have cited in calling for the article's repeal. (1)Greece's Penal Code criminalized malicious blasphemy against God under Article 198, punishable by up to two years' imprisonment, and public irreverence toward sacred objects under Article 199, punishable by up to three months. Both articles were repealed when a new Criminal Code took effect in July 2019, ending decades of prosecutions over art, theatre and social media posts deemed insulting to Orthodox Christianity. A conservative government announced plans that November to reinstate the offense but withdrew the proposal after public and international criticism. (1)Italy decriminalized blasphemy against God, bestemmia, in 1999, reducing Article 724 of the Penal Code from a crime to an administrative offense carrying a fine of 51 to 309 euros. Publicly insulting a religion in a way that expresses contempt for those who profess it remains a criminal offense under Article 403, punishable by a fine of 1,000 to 5,000 euros. (1)Ban or Official WatchlistAllGermany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the country's domestic intelligence agency, placed the Church of Scientology under nationwide observation beginning in the 1990s after German reunification, tracking the organization for what it described as totalitarian aims incompatible with the free democratic order. On 15 May 2026 the agency announced it would end Scientology's standing as a separate, nationwide intelligence target, citing the group's declining relevance at the federal level and a redirection of resources toward espionage, sabotage and terrorism; it stated it would continue investigating specific activities against the constitutional order on a case by case basis rather than monitoring the organization as a whole. (1)Greece's constitution, Article 13 paragraph 2, prohibits proselytism, a term Greek law leaves undefined but which its courts have applied against active attempts to convert people away from the majority Greek Orthodox faith. In Kokkinakis v. Greece, decided 25 May 1993, the European Court of Human Rights delivered its first ever finding against a state for violating Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, ruling that the criminal conviction of a Jehovah's Witness for proselytism was not justified by a pressing social need, even though the underlying constitutional ban on proselytism was not itself found to violate the Convention. (1)CapitalAllAthens (1)Berlin (1)Rome (1)Concordat BasisAllGreece has no concordat with the Holy See. Its church-state instrument runs domestically instead: Article 3 of the 1975 Constitution names the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ the prevailing religion and describes the Church of Greece as indissolubly united in doctrine with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, a constitutional establishment of the Orthodox Church itself rather than a treaty with Rome. Freedom of religious conscience for everyone else is stated in the same article, but the relationship the Constitution actually formalizes is with the Church of Greece. (1)The Lateran Treaty of 11 February 1929 between the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See ended Catholicism's status as Italy's official state religion of the pre-unification era by formalizing it instead, establishing Vatican City as a sovereign state and settling the "Roman Question." Its concordat provisions were substantially revised by the Villa Madama Accord of 18 February 1984, which removed Catholicism's status as the official state religion outright, ended mandatory Catholic religious instruction in state schools (making it optional), and replaced direct clergy salaries with the otto per mille scheme, letting taxpayers direct eight per thousand of their income tax to the Catholic Church or another participating recognized religion. (1)The Reichskonkordat, signed in Rome on 20 July 1933 by Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, for the Holy See and Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen for the German Reich, and ratified on 10 September 1933, remains formally in force in Germany today. Neither the Federal Republic nor the Holy See has ever renounced it, and its Article 21 guarantee of Catholic religious instruction as a regular subject in state schools still underlies German practice. The later Land level concordats and the church tax arrangements that fund Germany's recognized religious bodies build on the framework it set rather than replacing it. (1)Established YearAll1830 (1)1861 (1)1871 (1)Establishment StatusAllDisestablished (1)Established (1)Privileged Never Established (1)Government TypeAllfederal parliamentary republic (1)parliamentary republic (2)Legal StatusAllConstitution names Orthodox Christianity the prevailing religion and requires the head of state to be Orthodox, funding clergy salaries from the state budget; the Muslim minority in Thrace is separately protected under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. (1)The 1929 Lateran Treaty, revised by a 1984 concordat, ended Catholicism's status as official state religion and funds recognized religions through a taxpayer-designated otto per mille scheme; Islam has never secured a formal state intesa (understanding). (1)The 1949 Basic Law preserves a Weimar-era arrangement under which the state collects a mandatory church tax from registered members of recognized religious bodies on the churches' behalf; strict laws prohibit Holocaust denial and religious incitement. (1)Registration or Recognition RegimeAllArticle 13 of the Constitution protects the free practice of any "known religion," defined as one with open rather than hidden doctrine and worship. Three communities, the Orthodox Church of Greece, the Jewish community and the Muslim minority of Western Thrace, hold public law status and need not register at all. Law 4301/2014 created the country's first legal personality pathway for other religious minorities, through an application and court confirmation process; before that law took effect every other religious group could hold only private-law legal status, the ordinary status of a nonprofit rather than a status recognizing it as a religious body. (1)Religious communities may apply for status as a corporation under public law (Koerperschaft des oeffentlichen Rechts) under Article 137 of the Weimar Constitution, carried into the Basic Law by Article 140. The status requires a constitution and a membership large enough to promise permanence, and a community holding it is legally competent to levy its own church tax through the state's tax offices and to organize under public rather than private law. The Catholic Church, the member churches of the Evangelical Church in Germany and a number of Jewish communities hold it, and several states have extended it to smaller communities including Jehovah's Witnesses and the New Apostolic Church. A religious community without the status remains free to organize as an ordinary registered association (eingetragener Verein) under the civil code, with no state role in its finances or governance. (1)The Catholic Church holds its own constitutional relationship to the state under the 1929 Lateran Pacts, revised by the 1984 Villa Madama accord. Every other denomination's relationship to the state runs through Article 8 of the constitution, under which a denomination may negotiate an intesa, a bilateral agreement with the government ratified by parliament, setting the terms of its recognition including access to the optional eight per mille tax designation; the Waldensian Church signed the first intesa in 1984, and more than a dozen denominations, including major Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist and Orthodox bodies, have signed one since. A denomination with no intesa may still seek recognition as an admitted cult under the 1929 law (No. 1159), a lesser status carrying legal personality but none of an intesa's negotiated privileges; a group with neither status is an ordinary civil association under the general code. (1)Religious CompositionAllAbout 24-26% Catholic and 24-26% Protestant; religiously unaffiliated now the largest single group at over a third; Muslim minority near 5-6%, chiefly of Turkish descent (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). (1)About 78-80% Catholic; religious practice has declined and religiously unaffiliated Italians form a growing minority; small Muslim, Protestant and Orthodox communities (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). (1)About 90% Orthodox Christian; small Muslim (concentrated in Thrace), Catholic and religiously unaffiliated minorities (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). (1)Sovereignty StatusAllSovereign UN member state (3)State Funding MechanismAllA religious body holding Koerperschaft des oeffentlichen Rechts status may levy church tax (Kirchensteuer) on its registered members, collected by each Land's own state tax office (Finanzamt) as a surcharge on income tax, typically 8 or 9 percent of the income tax owed depending on the Land, and remitted to the church net of an administrative fee retained by the state. A member's liability ends only on formal deregistration from the church with the state civil registry (Kirchenaustritt), an in-person or notarized declaration, not a decision the church itself can record. (1)Clergy salaries are funded from the state budget under arrangements tied to Orthodox Christianity's constitutional status as the prevailing religion. (1)Recognised religions are funded through a taxpayer designated otto per mille scheme created by the 1984 revision of the Lateran Treaty; Islam has never secured the formal state intesa needed to participate. (1)BrowseCompareGermanyModern Area1 entryGreeceModern Area1 entryItalyModern Area1 entrySources1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category TreeComments (0)No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.Sign in to join the discussion.Reader Challenges (0)No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.