The Vaud Council of State has adopted the new 2025-2029 subsidy agreements with the canton’s churches. If the amount of the agreements remains unchanged, some paradigms are changed, reformulated or supplemented. For example, they now concretely address the issue of sexual abuse.
“After several months of constructive discussions with the Reformed Evangelical Church of the Canton of Vaud (EERV) and the Roman Catholic Ecclesiastical Federation of the Canton of Vaud (FEDEC-VD), then with the Jewish Community of Lausanne and the Canton of Vaud (CILV ), the Council of State has approved the new subsidy agreements of these three institutions for the period 2025-2029”, the government announced Thursday in a press release.
On a financial level, the agreements therefore renew the amounts paid until this year, i.e. a total of 63.5 million francs for the year 2025.
This envelope is distributed at the rate of 33.2 million for the EERV, 30.2 million for the FEDEC-VD and 141,000 francs for the CILV, Jean-Luc Schwaar, director of institutional affairs, told Keystone-ATS. and municipalities within the Department of Institutions, Territory and Sport (DITS).
Training and independent body
Although the volume of subsidies is unchanged, the texts of the agreements differ from those concluded previously on several points. Main novelty: they now contain “the commitment of the Churches and the CILV to put in place a system for protecting the integrity of the person and preventing abuse, particularly of a sexual nature”.
“If this system was already in place in the Churches, it now appears concretely in black and white in the conventions,” underlines Mr. Schwaar. “It includes training for church staff, as well as the creation of a body independent of the latter which is responsible for collecting and investigating reports from victims of abuse, and denouncing the facts to the courts in case of suspicion of a criminal offense”, he specifies.
Focus on missions
Another modification, the conventions “now focus on the missions carried out by the Churches in the service of all, and are no longer constructed in relation to the work positions granted to the latter”, explains Mr. Schwaar. “This new way of proceeding is part of the constitutional and legal framework applicable to the subsidization of Churches,” he recalls.
This “paradigm change” allows the State to have “better monitoring of the allocation of subsidies paid through the annual activity reports of the Churches, while offering the Churches greater room for maneuver in their governance “, notes the director of institutional and municipal affairs.
The content of the conventions also describes “completely” what are the services that the Churches and the CILV offer to the population, “thus showing the role that these institutions play in our current society”, also notes the Canton, both at the level of “societal values as well as social cohesion”. Finally, the principle of indexing the “payroll” portion is expressly stipulated.
This article was automatically published. Source: ats
