The Vatican has found itself in the middle of a critical financial crisis, which threatens to jeopardize the livelihood of retired clergy and staff worldwide
Except they have billions in stolen art and could liquidate it at any point. If not trillions, actually.
Nobody knows exactly what Vatican has but Porphyry Basin in the Vatican Museum is estimated to be worth 2$ billion alone (it was commissioned by Emperor Nero).
Vatican could literally end the world hunger with their treasure hoard.
Vatican could literally end the world hunger with their treasure hoard.
No they couldn’t. They’d end up making a bunch of warlords into billionaires while the regular people would go on starving. The only way to end world hunger is grassroots economic development and education (especially for women). You can’t do that by dumping billions of dollars into those countries. The problem is very tricky and the work is long and arduous.
Their art collection is so massive, containing such crazy rare items, many cannot have a price tag as they are literally priceless. It's impossible to calculate its value due to the extreme rarity, or because anything like it to compare it's value to is also in the Vatican collection.
When they sell 1 priceless art item, they can sustain themselves for a year. They have hundreds of thousands of those items, if not millions.
Saying the Vatican goes bankrupt sounds like "Elon Musk struggles to pay for his groceries".
Sounds to me their massive stream of money is declining and they want to scare people into giving them more money.
Though if the idea that high value art is actually a money laundering/moving scheme is true, this might not be the case. The idea is that no one or few people actually want to spend millions on art but pretend they do as a front to spend millions on something else.
They could probably save some money by reducing the "cover up pedophile priests" item in their budget.
But, but The eye of a needle was a market with a small gate and if you only had a reasonable load on your camels then they could pass through so it's actually ok for rich people to exist /s
That cope from Conservative Christians™️ is always funny. Similar statements show up in the Talmud. A large animal passing through the eye of a needle was a common idiom in Jewish culture at the time to demonstrate impossibility.
Bullshit. They own more land than damn near any other entity on the planet. The whole celibacy thing was so the priest could not take the church owning and give them to non-church kids.
Hurting for money? Sell some land. Then pay for the abuse lawsuits some more.
They could always start selling indulgences again!
In fact, they could even expand beyond the traditional Catholic market. Even Muslims get into Catholic heaven if they're willing to cut a big enough check! Maybe you can get some atheist billionaire to buy a $1 billion "just in case" indulgence.
They don't need to sell anything. They're sitting on the horde of Rome's wealth along with all the nazi gold the church took in during WWII. They have the wealth to easily pay their debts but would rather enter into bankruptcy than actually pay them.
There's a whole crypt of nicely dressed absolutely dead people who most certainly don't need to be wearing rubies and gold and diamonds all over their bones.
Of course people are blaming him being too accepting of trans people, his view of "let them survive but they're sinners unwelcome to the eucharist" is unfortunately far too progressive for some.
Fortunately the church of Jesus of Nazareth will prioritize profit over peace and love
The idea of the pope marginalizing a group because they’re sinners is pretty sad, given he has dedicated his life to teaching that literally every ordinary human is a sinner. Among other things.
Then that being too progressive for Joe Catholic is even more sad.
Unfortunately, what it is NOT is surprising. White Catholic family here. They dehumanize just as well as the rest of the conservatives.
It’s too progressive for American Catholics in particular who are currently experiencing a serious identity crisis and infighting because of trumpism. It’s been wild to watch unfold. An archbishop just got excommunicated for schism idk 6mo ago?
I am an agnostic so my opinion might not be worth anything to Christians (or Catholics specifically), but I don't really see the point in organized church structures. If you believe in God, support his ideals, why do you need to go to church anyway, or at least why would you want your local church support some big hierarchy (often with controversial opinions or actions) for your money?
Same reason people go to comicons or music concerts or protests. People just want to be with others who believe in and like the same things as they do. It's a pretty simple and basic human behavior.
It's been a long while since I was involved in a church, but my recollection of the Bible isn't able to reference anything that implies there is a need for the hierarchy associated with the Catholic Church, or similar. It kind of says you can have a personal relationship with God, and I don't recall anything about Mary being special in any way aside from giving birth to the so called Messiah.
The Pope should just issue a Papal Bull that God has forgiven the Vatican's debts. And their creditors won't be able to argue, as he's literally infallible.
That part was fine. According to the article, what's causing the issue is that Pope Francis said they should help the poor and that climate change is real, and all their scattered asshole donation-makers in all corners of the world got butthurt and turned down the money faucet.
I wonder how that can be. The Catholic Church owns real estate in almost every city in Europe, usually several buildings in larger cities, often in prime locations. Especially since these properties are only a fraction of the church's financial assets, the rental income alone should be enough to finance the church for all eternity.
Organizations that own that amount of stuff borrow against it to buy even more stuff and as it all goes up in value they borrow more and buy more stuff. In an endless loop. And people call crypto a scam 🤔
Owning that much in assets typically means you also have a lot of debt. Particularly with generational, wealthy, corrupt organizations.
Point being, they can be on the brink of bankruptcy even when owning half of Europe if they can’t service the debt they wound up.
Well, they can always get back to selling indulgences again or take out (another) mortgage on their state in the middle of Rome when the going gets tough.
They can be broke or rich depending on how they feel that day. They cook the books because they're their own country. They are truly a gang operation. My guess is they want you talking about them being broke as opposed to them being caught with more priests molesting children today.
It could be. I haven't heard of the Irish Star. I couldn't decide whether it was bullshit propaganda designed to sound Pope Francis sound like a problem, bullshit propaganda designed to attract clicks and nothing else, truth presented with the goal of making Pope Francis sound like a problem, or what really happened. I decided to post it and stop worrying about it.
Being owned by Reach plc is definitely not a reassuring sign of credibility. Highlights of other news outlets they own include the Daily Star straight up inventing an interview with Dwayne Johnson in 2019, the Daily Express having such a bizarre obsession with Princess Diana that they still pt her name in the headlines about once a week to this day, and the Daily Mirror seemingly doing its "journalism" primarily by the method of hacking into celebrities' personal voicemails throughout most of the 00s
Oh, pedo funding ran out. Now pedos come to various dictatorships asking for money. Say, Azerbaijan, that'd be those guys who have demolished probably more Christian heritage than ISIS.
BTW, my paternal line is Armenian Catholic from Khodorchur of Dayq province, so I do feel bad about them falling so low, but really nothing one can fix. Just let that thing die.