{"id":100,"date":"2008-09-26T09:19:52","date_gmt":"2008-09-26T09:19:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/09\/the-vaticans-midas-touch.html"},"modified":"2008-09-26T09:19:52","modified_gmt":"2008-09-26T09:19:52","slug":"the-vaticans-midas-touch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/09\/the-vaticans-midas-touch.html","title":{"rendered":"The Vatican’s “Midas touch”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Catholic Church may be the only institution doing well during the economic crisis. According to an exclusive from The Tablet’s Rome correspondent Robert Mickens<\/a>, the Vatican may finally have learned (after decades of deficits and fiscal mismanagment and even scandal) how to manage its affairs. Indeed, the Vatican seems to have developed a gift for prophecy that Wall Street could learn from.
\nThe piece, “Church with a Midas Touch,” is based on a confidential report sent to the world’s bishops, who, together with donations from the faithful, support the Vatican. The Holy See actually has few resources of its own, unless one wants to sell of the Pieta. The report isn’t that transparent, and much as to be taken on faith. The Tablet piece is only available to subscribers, but here are a few (gold) nuggets:<\/p>\n

–The Holy See’s total assets at the end of last year added up to nearly 1.4 billion euros or more than \u00a31 billion. It reveals that the Vatican’s financial advisers shrewdly spotted the risks of keeping the Church’s money tied up in shares and switched to safer investments, including gold. The Holy See owns almost a ton of gold which in today’s volatile market would be worth some \u00a315 million. (The math? Maybe $30 million?) That’s a decent sum, though hardly the endowment of a decent U.S. university.
\n–The Holy See’s most costly ventures are Vatican Radio, which in 2007 ran at a 24.3 million euro (\u00a319.2m) deficit, and its newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which lost about
\n4.8m euros (\u00a33.8m). Another interesting detail is that salaries, taxes and other expenses for some two dozen cardinals who work in the Roman Curia run to more than 3m euros
\n(\u00a32.37m) a year.
\n–The report is for the Holy See, not the Vatican City State–the church’s 108-acre physical “plant” with a post office, fire department, museums and such–which actually makes a few million a year. Nor does it include any accounting for the somewhat infamous Istituto per le Opere Religiose (IOR)–the “Institute for religious Works, more commonly known as the Vatican Bank.
\n–The Holy See’s biggest expenses go toward paying its personnel. There are salaries, pensions and health-care costs for some 2,748 employees and 466 pensioners. The workforce is made up mostly of lay people (1,212 men and 425 women), followed by diocesan clergy (778) and members of religious orders (243 men and
\n90 women). They cost the Holy See upwards of 77m euros (\u00a361m) in salaries and more than 100m euros (\u00a379.2m) in pensions and other benefits. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some will of course see this financial planning as the crass calculations of an institution that should give all to the poor. Others may see it as some welcome stewardship. Robert Mickens profitably cites the late archbishop and scandal-plagued former Vatican Banker, the Chicagoan Paul Marcinkus, who once said: “You can’t run the Church on Hail Marys.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Catholic Church may be the only institution doing well during the economic crisis. According to an exclusive from The Tablet’s Rome correspondent Robert Mickens, the Vatican may finally have learned (after decades of deficits and fiscal mismanagment and even scandal) how to manage its affairs. Indeed, the Vatican seems to have developed a gift…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Vatican's "Midas touch" - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/09\/the-vaticans-midas-touch.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Vatican's "Midas touch" - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Catholic Church may be the only institution doing well during the economic crisis. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}