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From John Allen’s column of 7/15/05
Basically speaking, it costs about $250 million a year to run the Vatican. The money comes from three principal sources:
The final surplus of $3.74 million was touted by officials as an impressive result, especially given that Vatican employees got a 9 percent raise in 2004.
Officials said they did not yet have an estimate of the costs associated with the death of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI, which they said would be presented with the financial statement for 2005.
nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/
Basically speaking, it costs about $250 million a year to run the Vatican. The money comes from three principal sources:
Code:
* Contributions from bishops' conferences, dioceses, religious orders, individual lay donors and "other entities." For 2004, that total came to $89 million. Of this amount, roughly $27.2 million came from individual dioceses under the terms of canon 1271 of the Code of Canon Law, which obligates dioceses to contribute to the financial support of the Holy See. (The sum represents an 8 percent increase over the previous year). This means that the 2,883 ecclesiastical jurisdictions in the world gave an average of $10,000 each in 2004, though no doubt wealthy archdioceses gave much more, and lots of smaller dioceses gave little or nothing.
* Earnings on real estate, which refers principally to roughly 30 buildings and 1,700 apartments owned by the Holy See in Rome, which in 2004 produced revenue of $64.5 million, owing to the inexorable rise in property values in urban Rome.- Earnings from investments and other financial activities, with the Vatican’s portfolio divided into 80 percent bonds and 20 percent stocks. In 2004, the financial statement did not provide a comprehensive total for this sector, but doing the math, earnings must have been in the range of $100 million. The statement noted that the sector showed an improvement of $21.5 million, attributed to an improved situation in financial markets in 2004.
The final surplus of $3.74 million was touted by officials as an impressive result, especially given that Vatican employees got a 9 percent raise in 2004.
Officials said they did not yet have an estimate of the costs associated with the death of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI, which they said would be presented with the financial statement for 2005.
nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/