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Comment by ithought | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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