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Debunking the Myth of Vast Vatican Wealth

September 26, 2024

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ROME – Some years ago, I was walking across St. Peter’s Square when I spotted a young woman standing near the famed obelisk and gazing up at the basilica with tears in her eyes. Assuming she was overcome with emotion at looking ad limina apostolorum, “to the threshold of the Apostles,” I approached and said something like, “It’s really something, isn’t it?”

It turns out I had badly misread the situation.

“I’m German,” she replied, “and all the gold and marble in that basilica cost my country the faith. The whole thing makes me sick.”

In all honesty, one can’t fault her reaction. It’s undeniably true that the sale of indulgences in the sixteenth century was a significant way in which popes of the era financed the construction of the basilica. (Sales campaigns even featured history’s first advertising jingle: “When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs!”)

It’s also true that abuses in the sale of indulgences helped spark the Protestant Reformation, with a large share of the German population abandoning the Catholic Church.

The episode captures a hard truth about the Vatican, which is that while it plays a critical role not only in governing the universal Church but also acting as a voice of conscience in global affairs, it’s also sometimes one of the principal obstacles to Catholic evangelization.

Think about it: How often, when a Catholic evangelist has mentioned the Church’s service to the poor, has someone responded, “If the Church really cares, why doesn’t the Vatican sell off some of that art?” How often, when an evangelist has tried to talk about the Church’s defense of immigrants, has someone smirked, “Then how come the Vatican has walls and won’t let just anybody in?”

That’s to say nothing of other persistent negative perceptions over the years—from the trial against Galileo to the alleged silence on the Holocaust—and, more recently, Rome’s belated and mixed response to sexual abuse scandals.

What all this suggests is that any Catholic evangelist worth his or her salt needs at least a basic degree of Vatican literacy in order to clear some of the stumbling blocks that can get in the way of presenting the faith.

We’ll tackle other matters in future pieces, but here, let’s start with perhaps the most common and most pernicious negative impression, which is that the Vatican may preach poverty but it’s actually rolling in dough.

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First, let’s run some numbers.

The Vatican’s annual budget for 2023 was $1.34 billion, which obviously isn’t anybody’s idea of pocket change. Yet for a term of comparison, consider that the University of Notre Dame in the same year had a $1.8 billion budget, which means it could pick up the Vatican’s whole tab and still have plenty of money left over for new football uniforms.

Notre Dame, by the way, is just one of 221 Catholic colleges and universities in the United States alone.

If we enter the private sector, the disparities are even more outrageous. In fiscal 2024, for instance, Microsoft spent $24.46 billion on sales and marketing and $29 billion on research and development—totals which the Vatican couldn’t match in its wildest dreams.

The same point applies when we pass to the Vatican’s patrimony, meaning the value of its investments and real estate holdings. The Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), which oversees those funds, controls about $2.9 billion in assets.

While the Vatican owns more than 5,000 properties in Italy and abroad—the real market value of which is unknown—70 percent of those holdings are leased or assigned without any rent being paid, so they actually end up costing money in maintenance and property tax.

To return to the Notre Dame yardstick, its equivalent of “patrimony” is the endowment fund, which last year totaled $16 billion—almost five times greater, in other words, than the Vatican’s. In fact, the Vatican’s limited reserves currently are generating fears of an unfunded pension crisis as more employees reach retirement age.

There’s also the “Institute for the Works of Religion,” better known as the Vatican Bank, which manages about $5.4 billion in assets. By banking standards, that’s almost laughable—JPMorgan Chase, for instance, controls around $3.5 trillion. Moreover, most of that $5.4 billion doesn’t actually belong to the Vatican but to depositors, such as religious orders and Catholic associations and movements.

Of course, the obvious response to all of this is: Yeah, but what about all those massive buildings? What about all that art?

If one is so inclined, you can come up with eye-popping numbers. Estimates of what it cost to build St. Peter’s Basilica in today’s money, for instance, range from roughly $5 billion to as much as $8 billion or more, making it one of the most expensive structures in the world.

By the standards of most comparable global institutions, the Vatican, financially speaking, is small potatoes.

Yet again, comparisons are instructive. The Abraj Al Bait hotel complex in Mecca, now known as the Clock Towers, built to cater to pilgrims to the Islamic holy city, cost $15.5 billion. The Marina Bay Sands resort in Singapore, where Pope Francis recently made an apostolic visit, cost $6 billion.

The real point, however, is that the magnificent structures and artwork in the Vatican are priceless but not especially profitable. They can never be sold or borrowed against, and while they generate millions in income every year from tourists and pilgrims who flock to visit them, they also cost millions in conservation, maintenance, and restoration.

Or, we could consider salaries. 

A Vatican cardinal receives a stipend of around $6,000 a month, out of which he has to cover his personal expenses as well as those of his household. Just to pick a comparison at random, a senior vice president at the Bank of America—more or less the secular equivalent of a cardinal—made somewhere around $17,000 a month last year, to say nothing of the value of stock options and bonuses.

At lower levels, the average lay employee makes somewhere between $17,000 to $25,000 a year, which is nobody’s idea of getting rich. Recent cost-cutting measures have hit the workforce especially hard; the Vatican’s Association of Lay Employees—the closest thing it has to a union—recently complained that seniority-related pay raises haven’t been made in years, overtime isn’t being paid, a freeze on hiring means that existing employees have to work longer and harder, and increases in rent on Vatican-owned apartments mean lay employees living in one have to pay even more.

The bottom line is that by the standards of most comparable global institutions, the Vatican, financially speaking, is small potatoes.

One index of the relatively lean operation: The total workforce in the Vatican—including both the Roman Curia, which administers the universal Church, and the Vatican City State, which oversees the Vatican’s physical territory—is around 5,000 people, which runs a global church of 1.3 billion souls.

A management expert once calculated that if the same ratio of bureaucrats to citizens were applied in the United States, there would be around 500 federal employees, as opposed to the three million currently drawing federal paychecks.

None of this is to say there isn’t legitimate criticism to be offered of the way the Vatican handles the money it does have.

From the Vatican Bank scandals of the 1970s and 80s to the recent “trial of the century” centering on a failed $400 million investment in London real estate, you could sometimes almost teach a graduate seminar on how not to achieve sound financial administration simply by watching the Vatican in action.

Evangelists shouldn’t seek to downplay those problems—doing so would smack of deceit and denial, and it would be futile in any event because of the wide publicity such meltdowns inevitably attract. Still, the point remains that by any reasonable standard, the Vatican is not “rich,” at least by institutional standards. Knowing that and being able to explain it is a tool that every evangelist ought to have in the apologetic toolbox.