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?
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?
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
A majority of a plurality is not a majority.
But you are entitled to your own opinions. Not that they are necessarily right.
[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2012/08/catholic-chu...
"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."
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,833509,...
Their US investments alone are worth a half-billion. Not so far off the mark.
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 Vatican is certainly wealthy, but Yahoo Answers should never be used as a "see? evidence!" item.
http://www.chick.com/catalog/tractByKeyword.asp?Subject=Cath...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.