Thursday, March 28

Robles spent more than four million euros on the salary of priests of the Armed Forces in 2021


The Ministry of Defense, headed by Margarita Robles, has allocated 4.6 million euros in 2021 to cover the salary of the 86 priests of the Armed Forces. That amount also includes the 242,807 euros allocated last year to the maintenance of the religious facilities of the military department, according to data obtained by this newsroom through a request from the transparency portal.

The State spent more than three million euros on the priests and churches of the Armed Forces in 2016

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This Wednesday Compromís has made public the cost of religious assistance in the Armed Forces in the last decade, a figure that has not stopped increasing in the last ten years. According to the data provided by the Government to Senator Carles Mulet, in 2012 the Government allocated 2.6 million euros to gross remuneration, 784,321 euros to a concept that they have called “company quota” and 37,336 euros to another described as “service external” to religious attendance.

Nine years later, in 2021, that breakdown is divided into 3.3 million euros for gross remuneration and 910,157 euros in “company fee”. The sum of these two concepts amounts to 4,232,267.64, an amount that does not coincide with the one that the Ministry of Defense has provided to this newsroom through the transparency portal. Sources from the Robles department clarify that the amounts do not add up because Mulet’s response was limited “to the salaries of military priests” and the one provided by the transparency portal is “wider” and “includes the total cost of that work” . In total, adding the data provided to the senator, Defense has paid 39.2 million in the last ten years to cover the cost of military cures.

With these expenses in religious assistance, Robles maintains the trend of her predecessor in office, the popular María Dolores de Cospedal, who in the last full year in which she was in charge of the Ministry allocated 4.57 million euros to religious assistance . At that time, in 2017, that amount was distributed in 4.2 million for the “retributions of the chaplains”, 260,000 euros to the maintenance of the parishes and churches that belong to the armies and 65,000 euros paid under the concept of “miscellaneous expenses”. of the military seminary. At that time, the Armed Forces had three priests less, 83.

The law of military career requires the creation of a Religious Assistance Service with special mention, with mention of the 1979 agreement between the Spanish State and the Holy See. According to this rule, “the priests integrated into the religious assistance service, who are military chaplains in the terms established in the aforementioned agreement with the Holy See, will be governed by the provisions therein, by the corresponding canonical legislation and by this provision “.



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