Vatican Library Puts 4,000 Ancient Manuscripts Available Online for Free | Hacker News Reader

Vatican Library Puts 4,000 Ancient Manuscripts Available Online for Free

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280 pointsShivetya134 comments

Absolutely incredible. Historical documents like this are priceless. I always get a chill when I look at stuff like this: these manuscripts give us the opportunity to "hear" from minds that vanished from this earth centuries ago.

Even if you can't read the text, there's something moving about seeing the painstaking and beautiful work that went into creating these. Those marks were made by a hand that has long since turned to dust... Made by someone who felt that what they had to communicate was vitally important to humanity.

Your post reminded me of one of my favorite books of all time, Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B.

Linear B is the name given to a syllabic script used on clay tablets excavated on Crete around 1900. Chadwick's book recounts the tale of how Michael Ventris ultimately deciphered it and revealed the text to be Ancient Greek rather than any other language, which was against scholarly opinion of the time - and even his own. It's a wonderful story about human intelligence (there was no Rosetta stone equivalent for Linear B; the decipherment had to be accomplished purely by deriving rules from the corpus), the transferability of skills (Ventris was an architect, not a linguist or cryptographer), dispassionately following where the evidence leads, and the value of sharing information openly in the sciences (Ventris' insights were enabled by data compiled and shared by others, notably the equally brilliant American researcher Alice Kober, as Margalit Fox documented in a more recent book).

Now, after it gets done describing this accomplishment, it ends with a brief section on how the now-readable documents revolutionized our view of ancient European history, and what their contents tell us about their authors and their lives.

It was a hugely inspirational read on so many levels. I read it as a teenager, and if there's any teen around you who seems like they might enjoy it - give it to them.

One of the coolest things about old manuscripts is definitely learning about where and when they come from, and which group of people wrote them and why. Lots of backstories... learning history is so much more interesting when a physical object gives it relevance and context.

Can we change this link to the actual source? http://www.mss.vatlib.it/guii/scan/link.jsp

Or the Vatican library homepage or this tweet: https://twitter.com/vaticanlibrary/status/522270002012246016

One feature I would love within HN submissions is to include alternate links, chose to link to the page I did because it the article was eye grabbing in the pictures they chose and they did provide sufficient background on the project I didn't feel as if it were merely blog spam; I have never been to that site before.

The Vatican is really a amazing piece of history in and of itself. Despite how you may personally feel about its religion, or the effects of it on the world. The enlightened western world we live in today would not exist without it, and without all the knowledge, art, and culture it (and its local branches) preserved for ~1000+ years.

Well… That's true of any strong and long lasting institutions.

Incidentally, many of the ancient documents in those archives were copied into it during the renaissance after surviving for hundreds of years in the Muslim-Arab world. The Hebrew document in that article (I think 'Supplement to The Torah' is a decent translation) by Maimonides is a great example.

Maimonades was a Jewish Scholar who lived in Spain (during the Muslim period), Morocco & Egypt. He can (and is) claimed by Arabs, Jews & the Helenic culture of the middle ages. If you think in terms of 'The Flame of Western Civilization' he was part of the movement that carried that flame for a few hundred years before it was carried back to Christendom during the Renaissance. You could also make the argument that European Christianity joins Western culture during the Renaissance.

But certainly, the Vatican is an incredible influence on Western culture, good, bad or odd.

Though forgotten by pretty everyone who doesn't study Medieval history, the Muslim scholar Averroës (Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rušd) was perhaps the single most significant figure, influencing all medieval scholars including Maimonides.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averroes

"Famous scholastics such as Aquinas believed [Averroës] to be so important they did not refer to him by name, simply calling him 'The Commentator' and calling Aristotle 'The Philosopher.'"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119629/

I saw this film a long time ago, and as I remember it was enjoyable and inspiring, so I recommend it as an easy to watch introduction on this topic and era.

Found some references:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishneh_Torah
  http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/682956/jewish/Mishneh-Torah.htm

Although it's great fodder for movies and ppl into conspiracy theories, getting an audited list of all the Vatican books/artifacts tucked away (and then digitizing everything) would be amazing to see in our lifetime.

The really really old stuff inherited from the Roman Empire days would be of particular interest. Not too many secret ancient libraries left these days...

not only preservation either: a ton of scholars were catholic priests[0], the "obscurantist church" is a rather recent meme.

[0] i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_scientists

Until a few centuries ago everyone in the western world was a catholic, so this doesn't mean much. It is not because of the church that great things were made, but in spite of it.

Well, for several centuries, to be a scholar you had to be a priest or monk. There were no educational institutions who could pay you money, and support from rulers (as well as rulers themselves) could come and go on a whim. So if you wanted a "career" in research (i.e. you were a smart and curious fellow who could read) the Church was your only choice.

This, of course, gave the Church the power to set the cultural and research agenda, and many bad decisions were taken with that power (as well as many good ones, of course), hence the "obscurantist" label. Also, burning one at the stake when you disagree with his theory of the universe is a bit harsh, you'll agree.

I do agree, but I meant that for a very long time science was not considered to be in contrast with faith.

That last claim is a bit rich: as center of hierarchical monotheism during an expansionist era they sure did a good job of sponsoring the destruction of the Meso-American cultures - the fact they're now accepting donations to share digital copies of some of the stuff they secreted does not really let them pass the buck.

At one point in time before we had universities, science and math research was done in monasteries. The Vatican paid for a lot of that research and education. So I assume they got a lot of books they collects or had written that they want to made free access to the public by digitizing them.

A lot of people have left the Catholic Church to go to Non-Denominational Churches, or else just became Atheists. So passing the hat around doesn't work as well as it used to.

Priests and Nuns take a vow of poverty, they are not spending the money on themselves. They use it for food panties, for homeless shelters, for healthcare, for education, and to pay their employees. A lot of times churches are in debt even if the people pledge to donate over a million dollars to the church, people don't always donate what they pledge or promise and many families even with good paying jobs just don't donate at all. There is nothing that forces people to donate 10% of their salary to a church, in fact most donate less than that. Some don't donate anything at all.

The documents won't rot away they are being taken care of and preserved. If there is not enough donations to digitize them, the world will have to go without them.

Just think this is a large collection of books from around the world that hasn't been seen since the Library of Alexandria. Books that were protected from the Nazis who wanted to burn them. Books that governments had wanted banned or censored. Books that brought about human advancement and civilization throughout history.

>> "Priests and Nuns take a vow of poverty"

It depends. "Priests who belong to a religious order (e.g., Benedictine, Dominicans, Franciscans, etc.) take the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Diocesan priests make two promises, celibacy and obedience; these promises are part of the ordination ceremony."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostolic_poverty

The Vatican is also turning to crowdfunding and is now seeking donations of €5o save a single page in a manuscript, while donations of at least €1,000 will see the backer included on the official supporters list

If they had literally put this on kickstarter, it would have been sureal.

I think the Vatican has some prior experience with crowdfunding.

Fortunately Kickstarter is not a store, so the Council of Trent [1] and Pius V should have no problem with offering indulgences as perks.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence#Council_of_Trent

LOL. You are definitively right :)

Does anyone know how/where I can back the crowdfunding?

https://support.digitavaticana.org/

The only issue I see with this method is the lack of flexibility in the amount: 5 euro per page or a 100, 1000 or 1000 euro donation as a one off or on a regular basis.

What If I am willing to donate 10 euro a month? Do I have to do it manually every month .... seems a bit awkward. After all they are asking for the money, not me.

Why is the catholic church panhandling in this way? Surely they can afford to do it themselves.

They talk about "saving" the documents. Are they going to just let them rot away if we don't cough up?

>Why is the catholic church panhandling in this way? Surely they can afford to do it themselves.

For the same reason funded startup's use crowd funding. It demonstrates that this is something a lot of people care about and builds community buy-in around a cause. The people that run this digitization program at the vatican have bosses too and they need to justify that their project matters and deserves more time and attention.

> Why is the catholic church panhandling in this way? Surely they can afford to do it themselves.

Pretty much all of the Catholic Church's money comes from passing the hat in one form of another, and its absolutely normal for a new initiative by a Catholic institution to be accompanied by an effort to seek direct donations to support that particular initiative.

> Surely they can afford to do it themselves.

How do you think they got that way? Institutionalized panhandling.

This is how the church does everything. They never use their resources (other than personnel) to do things, instead they rely on donations and keep their money in their own pockets.

The Church is a body of people. The people of the Church donate money towards its purposes - the preservation of manuscripts isn't a main focus of the Church and is something the support of which isn't confined to Christians (or in this instance Catholics, who may or may not be Christians!).

In the same way that you might donate to a soup kitchen run by a Church fellowship, because the money goes to feeding hungry people, you might donate to manuscript preservation.

That people in the Church donate their time and money towards such causes and ask for other people to donate their money doesn't seem wrong.

It's unlikely they'll "just let them rot away", but I'd imagine "document preservation" is far from the highest thing on Rome's list of financial priorities. So if you want something new and exciting done, they need to find cash from somewhere - asking those interested in the documents seems a reasonable way to do that.

That Aztec illustration!

I was a bit disappointed with all the mentions of "ancient" and the oldest thing on that page was 400 AD.

You don't have to go too many centuries before then and you start running out of writing.

400AD is closer to today than it is to the invention of writing.

That said, as you go back there is a lot less writing. Less writing happened and less survived.

The Hamurabbi code from 1754 BC is amazing partly because it's an island. A longish piece of text when all we have from the periods around it is lists of names and other short texts. Reading the Hamurabbi code (or the best translation we can get) really lets you feel like these people were real.

Still, there's a huge difference between that and something like Plato or Sun Tzu 100 years later. They were literate in a way we would recognize as literate and they could explain themselves through text, writing to convince other literate people like us, like we are doing write now on These guys really do exist through their works. You can form a mental model of how they think.

There are much finer examples of ancient literature, surviving versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh can be as old as the Code of Hammurabi, some Old Babylonian tablets from 1800 BCE survive though the version Sîn-lēqi-unninni compiled in Akkadian is a relative latecomer at 1200 BCE.

While I have only read it in translations, I find that it deals with concepts of personal death, friendship, loss, jealousy, love and sexuality in ways that are remarkably erudite and sophisticated.

"The Lament for Ur" is utterly stunning to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lament_for_Ur

and "The Debate between Bird and Fish" or "The Debate between Winter and Summer" are incredibly creative works:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_bird_and_fish

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_Winter_and_Summe...

Some of the Pyramid Texts of the 5th and 6th Dynasties (about 2400 BCE) --especially Utterance 373 for the Pharaoh Teti-- are quite beautiful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Texts#Examples

And if legal codes and injunctions are your thing "The Instructions of Shuruppak" or "The Maxims of Ptahhotep" are probably 700-900 years older than The Code of Hammurabi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_of_Shuruppak

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maxims_of_Ptahhotep

And the saddest truth about the really ancient writings: most are still unread, remaining in some closed vaults, or are being often actively destroyed!

Specifically: clay tablets written in cuneiform aren't easy to read: experts are needed, and we have much less experts than the material. So there is a lot of stuff in the vaults of the big museums never read. One of the big problems is matching the texts: when you have unsorted tablets it's like having only the single pages from many books without the page numbers. There is a story somewhere but it's hard to reconstruct.

http://theamericanscholar.org/an-epic-in-flux/

Situation on the field is much worse: robbers and wars (US-led Iraq war was a very dramatic example(1)) are destroying a lot.

(1) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4461755.stm

We also have the Laws of Eshnunna, preceding the Code of Hamurabbi by a couple of hundred years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Eshnunna

I enjoy these texts from our deep past, and I wish we had more of them. They show that our ancestors wrestled with many of the issues we contend with today. Thanks to several thousand years of prior work, we may have a bigger toolbox of solutions than they did.

Here's a fun thought, there's probably been more written since the dawn of the 21st century to today, than from the invention of writing to 400AD.

Glad to see it, especially when compared to the fate of Mayan codices that fell into catholic hands:

"We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction." (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices)

Catholics, in particular Franciscans, have also been extremely useful in describing, preserving and creating codices describing the life, history and mythology of the precolumbians, not to mention their roles in the syncretic emerging culture. Once could cite [Bernardino de Sahagún](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardino_de_Sahag%C3%BAn) for instance.

That was true of much of the Aztec written culture as well but there were some notable exceptions. We can thank Fray Bernardino de Sahagún for saving some important parts of the Nahua tradition despite his personal views:

http://beta.wdl.org/en/item/10096/#collection=florentine-cod...

This particular text is already widely available. (There are scans of the whole thing on Wikipedia, for instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Borgia#mediaviewer/File:C... .

Well, that Virgil at least is technically ancient, as 400AD in the Western Roman Empire counts as part of late antiquity.

My university has a very similar digitized collection, albeit smaller. One common denominator with these types of online collections is software that leaves much to be desired. Accessing the collection and searching through it is usually very painful. I realize they are on a tight budget, but it is disappointing nonetheless. Maybe it would be a good open source project.

> The Vatican is also still seeking funds to digitise the remaining 76,000 manuscripts, which it estimates will take more than 15 years, over €50m, and the efforts of more than 150 specialised experts.

What I'd do is do a quick pass over all the documents with a basic digital camera and store them as jpgs. Then, go back and do the painstaking, hi res scans.

I also worry about "FITS, the format developed by Nasa" for long term storage, as we all know what has happened to older Nasa storage formats and technologies. When I archive family pictures and stuff, I use jpg, for the simple reason of its ubiquity.

They require very careful handling. This wouldn't save any money or much time in the process.

I don't think you can do a "quick pass" over 76,000 fragile, ancient manuscripts, for any sane definition of "quick."

FITS was developed in part because of the problems NASA had with long-term storage formats. NASA realized that they were losing historical data because people were creating one-off file formats and then losing how they designed and developed them; libraries that understand FITS are available for pretty much every non-trivial language. For what the Vatican wants, it is better than JPEG -- it's lossless, it supports arbitrary color depths, its metadata format is much more extensible than JPEG's Exif, and it can support multiple images per file; for example, holding an entire multiple page manuscript in one file.

Anyone know if it's ok to make profit out of these?

Think: Retouch and sell as a painting.

I'm going to lean no because of this section in their "Rules for Readers" section: https://www.vatlib.it/home.php?pag=regolamento#regVIII

On the other hand, I'm not sure that there's a team of scholar-lawyers scouring the web for infringement.

IANAL

Short answer, no. Long answer, it depends and you'd need to be careful.

The issue isn't copying the artwork per se, it's copying the Vatican's picture of the artwork. They will likely release the images for free, but retain copyright over the digitisation.

Would you be caught for stealing a plate from an ancient book and incorporating it somewhere? Dunno. The Holy See is part of the Berne convention so you're still bound by their claimed copyright. Are they really going to go after you? I find it rather unlikely unless you're peddling images of the Sistene Chapel.

On the other hand if you made a reproduction of the image, say you found a drawing and manually vectorised it, then I think you would be safe - as after all, it's the photo that's copyright, not the manuscript.

In principle, taking a photo of a Van Gogh and putting it on a Tshirt is perfectly legal. The bans on photography in galleries boil down to:

- Light sensitive works

- Copyright on newer exhibits

- Profit making for the gallery (as many galleries in the UK are free, this is how they make their money)

- House rules, you may not be violating image copyright, but you may be violating house rules which they could kick you out for

They could put it under a CC licence?

> The issue isn't copying the artwork per se, it's copying the Vatican's picture of the artwork. They will likely release the images for free, but retain copyright over the digitisation.

In the US they can not claim copyright for this. This is very clear. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel.... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_...

Your best bet would be to ask them directly.

I don't know how they could claim copyright on the original works, but they may have a case if you reuse their digitized copy of the original work. Much like a photograph of a piece of art may fall under a different copyright (that of the photographer) vs. the art itself. Also, the Vatican operates under a different set of rules than the rest of Italy, so I don't know if Italian copyright laws apply the same there.

If you click through to a digital work: http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.A.1/0001?si... And then click on the shopping cart, it takes you to a page which talks about the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license... not sure how this works with the Vatican's own copyright.

There are watermarks on the images.

This is just in time. When everyone but the clergy forgot how to read those, they are putting 'em online. I especially like Old Slavonic ones, where notation for numbers is purely alphabetical with tilde. A+B is not boolean there. It returns Г, meaning V.

Is there actually a website to see the digitized art works?

Found it: https://www.vatlib.it/home.php?ling=eng&res=1920x1080

More specifically here's an index of digitized manuscripts. Click on the book to view one. http://www.mss.vatlib.it/guii/scan/link.jsp

Om nom, this is highly tasty. I hope one day all libraries will be accessible like that.

They want to crowd-fund the digitizing of their own collection? A multi-billion-dollar outfit needs to pass the hat to keep their own house in order?

Passing the hat is very much in character for them, unfortunately. It still happens in church every single time. As long as people keep giving, they'll keep doing it.

Passing the hat has been the church's business model for thousands of years.

Sure, for your community. But this is the central organization wanting community money to manage their fabulous collection of priceless texts. They could sell one of them to pay for the whole operation. Its ludicrous.

Then they'd be 1 short of their collection of fabulous texts. It would no longer be a complete collection.

Ha ha. They have bought/stolen thousands. They also do NOT own thousands. One text changing from the first category to the 2nd doesn't threaten their collection.

It's a museum. Should museums sell off their collections to pay to keep running?

I think the Vatican was crowdfunded in the same way the British Royal Family was. Theft, war, deception, destruction; then some analogous leaseback deal to legitimize everything.

I'm not sure the Vatican's revenue but I suppose a lot comes from the Vatican Bank and returns on their massive assets. Most of their charitable work comes from $2+ billion from the US Govt.

If you've seen Vatileaks on PBS, you know how frighteningly corrupt it is. The Pope's personal butler was a whistleblower, went to the media and then was arrested for possession of "classified" material. Sentenced to 18 months in prison but he instead served it in the Vatican. Then the Pope pardoned him.

> I'm not sure the Vatican's revenue but I suppose a lot comes from the Vatican Bank and returns on their massive assets.

The "Vatican Bank" (strictly, the Institute for the Works of Religion) has pretty miniscule assets by the scale of financial institutions, and returns in the high tens of millions annually.

> Most of their charitable work comes from $2+ billion from the US Govt.

Most of the funding for Catholic Charities, a US Catholic organization structured rather specifically to be able to accept government funding to private social charities given the particular regulatory regime in the US regarding church/state relations, comes from the US government, but that organization is not the whole of the charitable work of the Catholic Church in the US, much less the world.

The bank has about $6.3 billion in assets and in 2012 had a net profit of $117.4 million. They finally made their financial records public in 2013.

http://news.yahoo.com/whats-vatican-banks-balance-sheet-1458...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/business/international/vat...

Catholic Charities is definitely the biggest source of charitable work in the US and the majority of their budget comes from the US Government. 62% in 2010. There's also CRS (international), hospitals, Society of Saint Vincent de Paul (international) etc. all of which are much smaller.

> Catholic Charities is definitely the biggest source of charitable work in the US and the majority of their budget comes from the US Government.

A majority of a plurality is not a majority.

As a catholic I understand that you may not want to cooperate but calling it a 'multi-billion dollar outfit' is really off the mark by eons.

But you are entitled to your own opinions. Not that they are necessarily right.

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060715051049A...

Their US investments alone are worth a half-billion. Not so far off the mark.

Citing Yahoo Answers as a source? Whoa.

Well, citing a quote from an authority presented in a Yahoo Answer.

Ok, I googled again for you. Here's an expert from Georgetown U quoted in a Google Answer: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=54617

The "authority" quoted in the Yahoo Answers thread is Jack Chick, who's rapidly anti-Catholic (see http://www.chick.com/catalog/tractByKeyword.asp?Subject=Cath...), claims Dungeons and Dragons involves true demon worship, etc. - he's pretty much anti-anything that isn't hard-core fundamentalist Christianity.

The Vatican is certainly wealthy, but Yahoo Answers should never be used as a "see? evidence!" item.

Attacking the source? Weak.

The source cites Jack Chick as the evidence. He's a lunatic, not just on Catholicism.

http://www.chick.com/catalog/tractByKeyword.asp?Subject=Cath...

Which means grains of salt and skepticism, not outright discarding. Truth stands on its own regardless of the speaker. Otherwise it's ad hominem.

This is not a scientific journal. There is no such thing as an "invalid source", there are only things that are true and things that are not, plain and simple.

The lengths people will go to in order to avoid validating a piece of data is truly staggering..

And look? Turns out, he was right.

A source like Chick is invalid, plain and simple. It's like asking Hitler about Jews - some of what he says might be accurate, but you're not going to cite him ever on it.

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,833509,... says the Vatican's wealth is $10-15 billion. I suspect their total net worth is hard to calculate given that much of what they have is priceless - it'd be hard to put a price tag on St. Peter's Basilica.

There, was that so hard? Googling 'Vatican net worth' and choosing any of several substantially-agreeing links. Sorry I picked the wrong one, but the conclusion is the same: the Vatican is a multi-billion dollar operation.

While I agree with the conclusion, I disagree with the method:

googling for something and choosing from one of several "agreeing" links doesn't actually protect you from being wrong, if most of those links got their wrong data from the same original source.

Appeal to authority plus ad hominem against said authority leaves us back where we started, which was lack of verifiable evidence to support the assertion.

In lieu of accounting statements from the worldwide Catholic Church and its executive offices in the Vatican, we must necessarily make reasonable implications from the information that is available.

The Catholic Church has hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures. The Vatican has control over some portion of church revenues. It also has a publicly verifiable collection of religion-inspired artwork on display. It owns territory near a major European capital as independently sovereign territory, which is also a major tourist destination. Its subordinate entities in foreign jurisdictions have been the beneficiaries of legacies, escheat, and estate bequests for literally centuries, while largely benefiting from favorable treatment from the secular authority in majority Christian territory.

While the Vatican itself may not have direct and absolute ownership over the assets of the Church, it does have significant control over them. You don't have to be a cardinal to know that the Vatican archivists probably don't absolutely need to solicit direct donations for historical preservation.

But the Church is also a massive worldwide bureaucracy. The archivists may, in fact, find it far easier to fund their work via direct donations than by competing with all the other things the Church tries to do. Having theoretical access to a budget does not always mean you can actually spend the cash in a timely or expedient fashion.

Ethically speaking, I'm confident the archivists mean well, but they will essentially be proving that the Vatican can get additional revenue by holding the deteriorating old documents in its collection for ransom. We have as much reason to donate to them for this as we do to donate money to ExxonMobil to check that their pipelines running through wilderness areas are not leaking oil into them. If they can't maintain their own property, maybe they should be selling it to someone who can. There are plenty of museums and universities that would love to help in that way.

> The Catholic Church has hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures.

The Catholic Church is not a single expending entity.

> The Vatican has control over some portion of church revenues.

The portion the Vatican has control over are the Vatican's own revenues, including things like the Peter's Pence and the surplus returned by the Institute for Religious Works to the Vatican each year. This is in something like the low hundreds of millions annually, which isn't exactly something to sneeze at, but quite a lot of the existing operations would need to be curtailed to support the digitization of the library holdings without a separate revenue stream for that purpose.

> While the Vatican itself may not have direct and absolute ownership over the assets of the Church, it does have significant control over them.

It really doesn't. I mean, I suppose that in theory the Pope could simply start deposing bishops that refused demands to turn over local assets to the Vatican for its use, but there wouldn't be a global Church very long if that happened.

The church sometimes acts like 3000 separate entities, and sometimes acts like one monolithic entity, according to whichever is most convenient. When I apply the duck test, it quacks.

Yes, in theory, the Pope could suggest that preservation of historic documents in the Vatican archives might be an important issue for the church, and the nearly 3000 bishops could all ignore him without consequence. If he made an appeal to a billion people, there is a possibility no one would listen. Not. Bloody. Likely.

Again, I say that if the church cannot preserve its own property, it should sell some of the collection to support the rest, preferably to an entity whose primary mission is the preservation and dissemination of knowledge, rather than the dignity and tradition of a religion.

The call for donations to support the particular project is the way the Church makes appeals to "a billion people". Its how the Church funds pretty much everything it does, from a new roof for a parish church to missionary work to the much of the annual operation of the Holy See (through the Peter's Pence). So, this is no different from how the Church takes care of any of its property.

Local improvements are funded locally, an that's great. But a large project managing the church's closely-held fabulous wealth is a very different matter. Never mind my neighbor donates to the Fireman's ball; he wants me to help put sprinklers in his art gallery, I laugh.

And that is exactly how I feel.

We don't actually know the extent of the Vatican's wealth. It keeps that as secret as it is able, even from Catholics. We can see what it reveals to the public, and make implications from what it buys and sells outside its own closed economy. From what I can actually see, the Vatican is at least as wealthy as the parent entity of a multinational corporation, and possibly as wealthy as some other monarchies in Europe. I cannot even guess at what might be in its sovereign investment funds since World War 2. By the standards of absolutely everyone I have ever met in my entire lifetime, the Vatican is rich--and not just "country club" rich, but "if they actually cared to open the books, Forbes would put them on a list" rich. I don't know how high they might be on that list, but they would definitely be on it.

And a rich man should not be passing the hat to get enough money to polish his own silver.

To return to the topic: how big do you think the Vatican is? Net worth, round to billions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_T._Chick You are quoting a guy with a life-long, emotional animus - nobody should confuse his assertions with facts.

Sorry! Didn't know that guy. But I provided a Georgetown U reference as well. It substantially agrees with the estimates of size. So Mr. Chick may have accidentally got something right.

I like that the Chick quote references investments in at least 7 companies which no longer exist, at least 2 of which went bankrupt. The information does not seem current.

> Bankers' best guesses about the Vatican's wealth put it at $10 billion to $15 billion.

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,833509,...

So .5 to .8 WhatsApps?

In my mind, I wonder if you could draw mental comparisons between the Catholic church and universities. Both use an endowment to further their goals, expansion, charity, but there is a implicit desire to keep growing the endowment to further those goals. Ponder for a minute -- Harvard was chartered in 1636 and has an endowment of $36.4 billion. If the church spends most of the money it receives/earns every year, why not just come out and state it?

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/14/16957985-insid...

The catholic church in America has an estimated annual expenditure of $170billion a year[1]. I think the 'multi-billion dollar' bit is somewhat indisputable. The 'outfit' description might be though, depending on your chosen belief system.

[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2012/08/catholic-chu...

True, but the expenditures of the Vatican are only ~$300 million [1]. The Vatican doesn't just spend money from other countries. (The only exception is Peter's Pence, which is an annual collection taken up in late June where Catholics can give directly to the Vatican.)

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

Also,

"The Economist estimates that annual spending by the church and entities owned by the church was around $170 billion in 2010 (the church does not release such figures). We think 57% of this goes on health-care networks, followed by 28% on colleges, with parish and diocesan day-to-day operations accounting for just 6% and national charitable activities just 2.7% (see chart). In total, Catholic institutions employ over 1m people."

"The church is the largest single charitable organization in the country. Catholic Charities USA, its main charity, and its subsidiaries employ over 65,000 paid staff and serve over 10m people. These organizations distributed $4.7 billion to the poor in 2010, of which 62% came from local, state and federal government agencies."

http://www.economist.com/node/21560536

Giving researchers and enthusiasts access to the Vatican Library collection for free over the Internet isn't really part of their mandate.

There's no paywall, no onerous registration requirements, but you focus on a request for completely voluntary donations towards providing more free access documents ... really?

The Vatican (by which you mean the Catholic Church) may be a "multi-billion-dollar outfit", but the vast, vast majority of that money is used for charitable works... and in fact those billions of dollars all come from (wait for it!)... passing the hat... so what's wrong with that?

In 2010, Catholic Charities received $2.9 billion from the US Government. This represents about 62% of their revenue. Only 3% ($140 million) came from passing the hat around inside of churches. The rest was from in-kind contributions, investments, program fees and community donations.

Source- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/us/for-bishops-a-battle-ov...?

They at least get $2 billion every year from the Office of Faith Based Initiatives.

I personally find a lot wrong with this.

Catholic charities =/= Catholic Church

Not true. It was founded and is headquartered at CUA.

While this is about Catholic Charities of Baltimore, their national office is Catholic Charities USA-

>Catholic Charities began with the establishment of the Catholic Church in America. John Carroll, the first Bishop of Baltimore, declared in 1792 that one-third of all parish revenues should go to “the relief of the poor.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Catholic_Charities#H...

> > Catholic charities =/= Catholic Church

> Not true.

No, entirely true. Catholic Charities USA is a federation of various US-based Catholic charitable organizations (and is itself a member of a similar global organization, Caritas Internationalis), but it is not the same thing as the Catholic Church, nor even the same thing as the charitable activity of the Catholic Church, nor even the same thing as the charitable activity of the Catholic Church in the USA.

> While this is about Catholic Charities of Baltimore, their national office is Catholic Charities USA

No "Catholic Charities of Baltimore" does not have a national office, they are non-profit organization founded by the Archdiocese of Baltimore. They are a member organization Catholic Charities USA (a much newer organization), but CCUSA doesn't run or direct its member organizations.

People have the right to choose where their Church tax goes right? In which case you have no argument.

There is no http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax in the US, although churches are exempt from Federal income tax. When I lived in Switzerland, I was stunned that church taxes still exist there.

Proselytizing is not doing charitable work.

So feeding starving kids is charitable work, but speaking about your religion at the same time makes it non-charitable?

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