you mean a whole defcit of about 12 million dollars?
and then you want to compare 1st world countries maintaining billion dollar budgets with TRILLION dollar deficits?
yeah, i dont think that works out in your favor man…
How so? Since when is having a balance budget a bad thing? What the article is showing is that the expenses, revenue, and monetary resources of the Vatican are really
quite small for a worldwide operation. In fact, IBM generates about 10 times the revenue as the entire Vatican nation in a given year. Further, the Vatican operates almost exclusively off of endowments, donations, and the sale of merchandise (much like a college or university). There’s no tax system to exploit people with, as there is in other nations.
So, let’s do a little experiment. Let’s say that we actually DID want to have a fire sale at the Vatican and sell off everything. Firstly, you have the problem that some things are simply unsellable. Obviously, no matter what you do, you can’t sell the Sistine Chapel to become the latest Starbucks. A building like that will always be a church, as will St. Peter’s Basilica. What else would you do with it? The only other option is for it to become a museum, and you’ll face the same expense problems anyway. So… there’s all that art! Is it wrong to preserve it in museums and keep the wealth from the poor? If so, then the Smithsonian better open up it’s vaults during these tough economic times, and so should the Louvre, the Pinakotek, the British Museum, and so on. But, that’s besides the point. For the sake of argument, let’s sell it. Let’s give it an estimated worth of $2 trillion. Once it’s sold, let’s divide up the wealth and distribute it to the poorest half of the world (about 3 billion people). That will give each of those poor people… are you ready… about $667 dollars total. Now granted, given that the average yearly wage around the world is about $300, this would
indeed help out those people for about two years. However, most of those people would then go right back to being poor, and all of that art would be behind closed doors in private hands forever. The net gain would be very little. It would have about the same effect as last year’s economic stimulus check from the federal government. Add to that the fact that the Catholic Church is already, by FAR, the largest charitable organization on earth, and there’s not much of an argument at all.
The best argument, however, comes from Jesus himself. Not only did He state that the poor would
always be with us, but He scolded the Apostles for complaining about the woman wasting precious oil on washing His feet. In the end, our wealth has no real value at all, and Jesus knew it. If that art (much of which was donated to the church, btw) can help to inspire people to worship, why would we be against that? We should give our
finest to God, just like when we dress nice for church, and Jesus tells us as much.
And another point… most cathedrals actually generated huge amounts of money for their towns, both in the Middle Ages and still today! Aside from donations to the church, thousands were employed in the construction and eventual maintainance of the buildings. Towns developed tourist industries, which required taverns, inns, hotels, restaurants, and so on. Schools were almost always attached to cathedrals (virtually every important university in Europe was originally attached to a cathedral). Having a cathedral in your town was like an economic engine that, added up over the life of the town, helped make
everyone’s lives better.
