John Allen's column this weekend had two sub-topics that are quite informative, and the first one analyzing the finances of the Churfch in the United States demonstrates his commendable enterprise.
The Church as a whole
does not have 'deep pockets:
Parishes and dioceses are largely autonomous in what they earn and spend,
and the dioceses take no part of any revenues by fee-earning schools and hospitals
August 16, 2017
Most people believe the real power in Catholicism resides with the hierarchy, and in terms of both theology and Church law, that's basically right. For instance, canon law says the Pope wields "supreme, full, immediate and universal" authority, and it's tough to get more sweeping than that.
One wonders, however, if an accountant would reach the same conclusion.
When it comes to the financial dimension of Catholic life, there are certainly some deep pockets out there. Just to offer a few examples:
o The University of Notre Dame, America's flagship Catholic university, has an annual budget of $1.2 billion and an endowment estimated at $7.5 billion.
o The Archdiocese of Chicago last year reported cash, investments and buildings valued at $2.472 billion.
o The Knights of Columbus has more than $85 billion of life insurance in force, with $8 billion in annual sales.
[Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight and Ettore Gotti Tedeshi's nemesis, must find IOR a petty enterprise in comparison!]
o In Rome, the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), known popularly (if, some say, inaccurately) as the "Vatican Bank," administers assets in excess of $6 billion.
o American Catholics drop more than $8 billion every year into the Sunday collection plate, which works out to more than $150 million a week.
o In Germany, the Catholic church netted $8.8 billion in 2010 from the national "church tax," allowing it to remain the country's largest private employer after Volkswagen.
My addendum: Just for perspective, consider this accounting of revenues to the Vatican in 2011, from the financial statements released last month:
The Vatican Museums produced a revenue that passed from EUR 82,400,000 in 2010 to EUR 91,300,000, for a total of more than five million visitors.
Peter's Pence - i.e., donations made by the faithful to support the Holy Father's charity - rose from USD 67,704,416.41 in 2010 to USD 69,711,722.76.
Contributions made pursuant to canon 1271 of the Code of Canon Law - i.e., the economic support offered by ecclesiastical circumscriptions throughout the world to maintain the service the Roman Curia offers the universal Church - rose from USD 27,362,258.40 in 2010 to USD 32,128,675.91.
Further contributions to the Holy See made by institutes of consecrated life, societies of apostolic life and foundations rose from USD 747,596.09 in 2010 to USD 1,194,217.78. Thus the overall increase with respect to 2010 was of 7.54 per cent.
As it does every year, the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR) offered the Holy Father a significant sum to support his apostolic and charitable ministry. The amount involved for the financial year 2011 was EUR 49,000,000.
That's a total of EUR 243,332,614 - really small potatoes compared to the figures cited in Allen's sampling. Like one-sixth of Notre Dame's annual budget, for instance. Or that Sunday massgoers in the US contribute an annual $8 billion to their local churches, which is $2 billion more than the total assets controlled by the IOR! So, Jeffrey Anderson and all you dreaming of the pot of Vatican gold at the end of the pedophile rainbow, better think twice!
Simply ticking off those dollar amounts, however, two points are easy to miss.
First, the vast majority of money washing through the Church remains on the local level, especially the parish. In the United States, more than 90 percent of revenues collected by parishes remains there. Those funds are not centrally collected, and they're not really even centrally tracked, either by the bishops' conference or by Rome. Nobody in the Vatican could tell you how much a parish in Dubuque, Iowa, spent this month on coffee and donuts after Mass.
Second, much of the real money bypasses the hierarchy. To take the most obvious example, Catholic hospitals generate billions in revenue, well above what parishes will ever see from their collection plates. Hospitals may be sponsored by a religious order or other canonical entity, but they're usually governed by a lay board of directors and incorporated under civil, not ecclesiastical, law. The same point holds for most Catholic colleges and universities.
If you're looking for the real moguls and tycoons in the Church, in other words, they're not to be found among the bishops.
Let's crunch some numbers to flesh out these observations.
Based on data from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, average annual parish revenue in the United States is $695,291. Joseph Harris, one of the premier financial analysts in American Catholicism, has done the math.
Multiplying that estimate by the 17,139 parishes in the country yields total parish income of $11.9 billion, with two-thirds ($8.2 billion) coming from the collection plate. The rest comes from capital campaigns, one-time gifts, inheritances and other relatively minor sources.
Since average parish expenses are $626,000, most places are basically breaking even. (The national total for parish expenses works out to $10.7 billion.) Salaries are typically the largest line item, representing more than 40 percent of parish budgets. Other major outlays include the physical plant,; parish operations, such as a soup kitchen or catechism program; and in some cases, subsidies to a Catholic grade school. Parishes are also expected to provide money to the diocese, a contribution known as the cathedraticum.
At the diocesan level, 15 percent of America's 196 dioceses have budgets of more than $20 million, while 15 percent have budgets between $10 million and $20 million, 35 percent are under $5 million, and 40 percent fall between $5 million and $10 million.
In 2010, the Archdiocese of Chicago had a budget of $120 million; the Diocese of Juneau, Alaska, the smallest in terms of population, had a budget of $1.5 million. All told, a rough estimate for combined diocesan expenditures in America every year would be $2 billion.
Of course, bishops don't directly control parish assets. Taken together, however, the amounts for parishes and dioceses provide a sense of officialdom's financial footprint.
Now, some terms of comparison.
The 10 largest Catholic universities in the United States, as measured by enrollment, are DePaul, St. John's, Loyola, Saint Louis, Georgetown, Boston College, Fordham, Villanova, Notre Dame and Marquette. In 2011, their annual operating budgets, taken together, totaled $6.27 billion. All by themselves, these 10 schools spent roughly the same amount as more than 17,000 parishes, and three times as much as all the country's dioceses.
According to the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, there are 251 degree-granting Catholic institutions of higher education in the United States. Most are fairly small financial potatoes, but their total assets still easily dwarf the official institutional structures.
Turning to hospitals, just one Catholic system -- Ascension Health, the country's largest, with 1,400 locations in 21 states and the District of Columbia -- had revenues of $15 billion in 2011, exceeding the combined haul for all parishes.
There are 56 Catholic health care systems in America, and in 2010, the Catholic Health Association reported they had total expenses of $98.6 billion. That's almost 10 times the amount spent by parishes, and a fraction under 50 times the amount spent by dioceses.
Catholic Charities USA, one of the largest private charitable networks in the United States, had revenues in 2010 of $4.67 billion, of which $2.9 billion came from the government and most of the rest from private donations. This one charity, in other words, collected more in public funds alone than all the country's dioceses spent.
What insights flow from these numbers? At least four come to mind.
First, they provide a glimpse of how the world looks through the eyes of a bishop. When tensions flare with a university or hospital, there's often a tendency to frame things as "powerful bishop versus defenseless institution." The way the typical bishop might experience it, however, is more like
"cash-poor bishop versus deep-pockets institution."
Second, running these numbers corrects an overly "purple" ecclesiology, in which "the c[Church" is defined almost exclusively in terms of the hierarchy. At least as far as dollars and cents are concerned, that's obviously off the mark.
Third, the numbers suggest a possible financial dimension to some of today's debates over Catholic identity. Understandably, some bishops may fret that if schools, hospitals, charities or religious orders drift out of the official orbit, it's not just the Church's missionary capacity that's at stake, but an enormous chunk of its financial footprint too.
[Does this 'foot print' really matter, since none of the money goes to the bishops or the dioceses anyway? The only thing that ought to matter to the bishops is whether these institutions are providing services and instruction according to the teachings of the Church - and if they don't, that they stop identifying themselves as Catholic!]
A fourth reflection comes from Harris.
"Money is a mystery in the Church," he told me. "We don't know what we have or what we spend it on, so we lurch from crisis to crisis." [Not such a mystery that Harris couldn't hazard an educated estimate, as he did above! In terms of the Church itself, its parish-diocese organization dictates that 'what we have' and 'what we spend' are determined by what the individual parish and diocese receive and spend, independent of any revenue-generating Catholic institutions - i.e., fee-charging hospitals and higher institutions of learning - found in the parish and diocese. So it seems clear that the parochial and diocesan finances have nothing to do at all with the finances of the Vatican, for example, other than any annual portion they may pass on to the Vatican as Peter's Pence.]
Based on the kinds of numbers provided in this column, Harris estimates that total annual revenue for the Catholic church in America works out to around $153 billion, but he's the first to admit that's really just a guess.
Harris believes the resources exist to pull together accurate financial data if the Church gets its act together:
"This is not an impoverished organization," he says.
[Again, how can Harris speak of the entire Church - if that is what he means by 'organization' - in terms of estimating overall income and expenses, when he has just made clear that local ecclesial jurisdictions have autonomous finances? Besides, while most of the dioceses and parishes in the West may not be impoverished - some US dioceses had enough in properties and other assets to settle multimillion judgments against priest offenders - one cannot say that for the dioceses and parishes of the Third World, who often have to be assisted by affluent dioceses in the Western world and other Catholic organizations to meet their expenses.
A new poll shows figures on
atheism and religion today
August 16, 2017
The international polling outfit WIN-Gallup International has released a new global survey that shows atheism is on the rise, but 59 percent of the world's population still describes itself as "religious."
Taken together, the results seem to debunk two persistent myths about global religion:
Atheism is mostly a Western phenomenon. Instead,
Asia is by far the world's most atheistic continent, with China alone home to two-thirds of the roughly 900 million atheists on the planet.
Christianity is in decline relative to other world religions, especially Islam. Instead,
nine of the world's 10 most religious nations are majority Christian, and people who self-identify as Christian are more likely to describe themselves as "religious" than Muslims (81 percent to 74 percent).
Pollsters asked the same question of people in 57 nations: "Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say that you are a religious person, not a religious person, or a convinced atheist?"
According to the survey, the following are the world's top atheist nations as measured by percentage of population:
China: 47 percent
Japan: 31 percent
South Korea: 31 percent
Czech Republic: 30 percent
France: 29 percent
Germany: 15 percent
Netherlands: 14 percent
Austria: 10 percent
Iceland: 10 percent
Australia: 10 percent
Ireland: 10 percent
Overall, the WIN-Gallup International poll concludes that 13 percent of the global population is atheist, up by 3 percent from 2005. The 2012 estimate translates into 900 million atheists worldwide. If 47 percent of China's 1.3 billion people think of themselves that way, that's 611 million atheists in China alone, two-thirds of the total.
The WIN-Gallup International poll found that these are the most religious nations, again as measured by percentage of population:
Ghana: 96 percent
Nigeria: 93 percent
Armenia: 92 percent
Fiji: 92 percent
Macedonia: 90 percent
Romania: 89 percent
Iraq: 88 percent
Kenya: 88 percent
Peru: 86 percent
Brazil: 85 percent
All but Iraq are societies in which Christianity is the dominant religious tradition. Two are traditionally Catholic nations (Peru and Brazil), three are traditionally Orthodox (Armenia, Macedonia and Romania), and the rest are mixed among a variety of Christian confessions, though Catholicism is a significant presence, as in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya.
As a footnote, eight of the 10 nations with the highest percentages of atheists are also traditionally Christian, but only two are historically Catholic (France and Ireland) and none are Orthodox. In tandem with other findings, the results could suggest that Catholicism and Orthodoxy have weathered the storms of modernity slightly more successfully than traditional versions of Protestantism.
The survey also asked people if they identify with a religious tradition, regardless of whether they're personally "religious." The percentages in major traditions who said they're also "religious" are as follows:
Hindus: 82 percent
Christians: 81 percent
Muslims: 74 percent
Jews: 38 percent
[That 62 percent of Jews do not consider themselves 'reiigious' is a surprise. That means at least 6 out of 10 Jews. They may not be atheists but that's an alarming rate of secularism for Judaism!]
With regard to the United States, the WIN-Gallup International poll showed a significant decline in religiosity since 2005. The percentage of Americans describing themselves as "religious," according to the poll, dropped from 73 percent to 60 percent, while the share identifying as atheist rose from 1 to 5 percent.
Of course, timing and how questions are phrased can skew poll results, especially in a cross-cultural survey. People can also interpret the findings in various ways. Some experts in the United States, for instance, argue that what the poll captures isn't a real shift in religiosity, but rather the declining social stigma attached to calling oneself an atheist, or admitting out loud that you're not religious.
Yet at the big-picture level, these results can help reframe perceptions of the global situation -- especially with regard to where the atheists are, and how Christianity is doing.
One would like to hazard an educated guess at why the atheist figures are the way they are. One would think that China's leading the atheist pack could be attributed to 50 years of state atheism and official anti-religious hostility. But neither Russia nor any of the former Soviet republics - where Communism took over 30 years earlier than China - even figure in the top 10 at all! (I haven't the time to check now, but I would like to see the figures pre-Communism. Perhaps even then, China was already largely irreligious, whereas Russia at least and its neigboring Soviet republics in eastern Europe have always been very Orthodox, and Communism only seems to have blanketed over that inherent religiosity without stifling it - if even the likes of Putin and Medvedev can surface immediately post-USSR as devout Christians!)
I must say I did not realize the strides that secularism - and with it, atheism - has made in Japan and South Korea. The atheist quotient in the Czech Republic and France is not surprising, but it is, that France has almost twice as many atheists as Germany.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/08/2012 23:30]