It’s really a case of rich church spending on making sure it holds regional power though.
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Why wouldn’t darling Pope Francis open up the ledger books and show how the church is emptying its thousand year old coffers to improve conditions around the world? He could lead by example. In this age of church reform, why not open the books for all to see? Here you and I are arguing about what sliver of its $170 billion dollar budget goes to actually improve the human condition, but he could just show us.
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so the pope condemns the “wealthy few” who hoard the riches that “belongs to all” from atop his golden throne in his 15 billion dollar palace which no one pays taxes on.
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Ah okay, so as long as something’s labelled “charitable giving” for tax purposes, it’s a good thing that’s going to benefit the poor.
Gotcha.
Would you mind cutting a check to the Donald J. Trump Foundation, and show how much of a charitable giver you are?
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A whole lot of the Church’s wealth is tied down into the churches and the land they stand on, and/or artwork of historical value. Could the Catholic Church do better? Absolutely, no question about that. Are they especially awful and hypocritical? AFAIK, not really.
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Yes, for actively shielding child rapists from various country’s justice systems and putting them up in a literal gilded palace for their troubles.
Yes. By claiming they have any moral high ground at all, much less are the arbiters of absolute truth and morality.
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Not what I said.
Yeah, the Catholic Church’s handling of the child sexual abuse has been a miserable shitshow all the while. But my comment was meant in the context of hoarded wealth, where – considering the sheer size of the Church – they are not especially bad, again AFAIK. (Speaking as a Lutheran here, so I don’t even have a personal stake in the matter!)
Anyway, all of this is a distraction – Pope Francis is undeniably correct when he condemns massive wealth concentration, and the poverty and societal damage such lopsided distribution causes. Whatever complaints you and others have about the Catholic Church, none of that changes that he’s right on that.
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Actually, I’m surprised it’s that low. I think it’s worth considering that there are an estimated 1.2 billion catholics in the world, so we’re talking about 100 bucks a head. If we are talking “assets” then probably the bulk of that is real estate. That number honestly makes me wonder if the church is even that rich. It’s not like they can just liquidate churches and give them to the poor.
I’d also like to point out that if the pope is railing against the rich while sitting on a gold throne, it’s worth wondering whether he isn’t intentionally railing against people in his own church. Whether they claim to have a supreme and infallible leader or not, there are politics in the top tiers of the church and the pope doesn’t have unlimited power over the organization. I sometimes take some of the things he says publicly as a rebuke of catholic leadership. Some of it explicitly is.
I doubt I’ll actually like the policies of any pope within my lifetime. But I’m glad to see Francis actually stand up for the poor.
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… from the Church’s own sovereign city-state within one of the most expensive cities in the world (Rome).
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What a disgusting hypocrite. The Vatican sits on ‘thee’ largest mountain of cash and holdings IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. The Vatican could solve the ENTIRE world’s hunger issues with one single stroke. What a fraud this guy is. …The entire Catholic church is utterly irrelevant and wholly defunct, a mere remnant of a once masterfully created mass-mind-program that only the extremely stupid still ‘buy into’ and ‘believe’…even as this so called ‘church’ CONTINUES to rake in billions from the dumb, stupid, and gullible… Heck, they even burned their ONLY lights in way of all the so called ‘Saints’ who they mostly outright burned at the stake…only to label them ‘Saints’ hundreds of years after the fact. Who in their right mind would CONTINUE to give this shill corporation ANY of their money, time, or ‘belief’…???..???..??? Astounding how many stupid people there truly are in the world, including the one at the top of the mountain himself : ‘the Pope’. Pope my ass.
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In my hometown, the local diocese owned quite a lot of residential real estate that was bequeathed to it as its parishioners died off. They own a whole lot more than just the churches.
In countries like Brazil, they probably own vast amounts of land, but the dollar value may not be that high.
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AFAIK he has underlings for that.
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It was straining for two days, and now it’s working on the update to the update. (Oh, and Adobe Flash. “I don’t want Adobe Flash. I’ve uninstalled the normal version ages ago. I don’t want any Flash.” “You will like this Flash security update. Eat the ice cream!”)
That’s how you end up with … wait, umm… can a PC get hemorrhoids?
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Yeah, but try to get birth control out of them. Not only do they not allow getting your tubes tied in their hospitals it’s been found in a lot of cases they make Dr agree to not perform those kinds of procedure s anywhere to get admiting privledges.
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Yeah, I don’t agree with that policy at all, but it’s consistent with the Catholic doctrine of “natural law.” Again, I don’t agree with this view of contraception, but they’re not doing it just to fuck with you.
I don’t understand how a church funded corporation is allowed to call itself a hospital when it refuses to practice important schools of medicine.
“We’re a restaurant but we don’t believe in napkins or water glasses.”
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Well that’s just a bad analogy, come on now, you can do better. To whit: You don’t go to a Chinese place for a burrito.
No. If you go to a hospital, it is ABSOLUTELY REASONABLE to expect them to comply with the NATIONAL STANDARD OF CARE.
Also, they buy out all the hospitals in large areas making it impossible to get contraceptives prescribed, intruding on American’s liberties and freedoms. Not everyone can afford to go a hundred miles for an abortion if they’ve got non-viable fetus the catholic church holds sacred.
They’re medically inadequate. They’re actively getting rid of “competition” because remember, in the US healthcare is a commodity, not a right.
Hospitals are not the place to enforce your bronze age ideology on people and it’s barbaric that they do.
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