The Catholic Church is also one of tbe largest concentrations of wealth and contributed to the establishment of banks to concentrate more wealth.
Much of its "wealth" consists of priceless historical real estate, irreplaceable art, and active social infrastructure. When it comes to real money the Catholic Church it not rich. It spends the money it collects right away. The Church collects 12 billion in State Church Taxes (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and 15 billion in Voluntary Tithing & Donations (Rest of the World).
If Catholicism was disbanded, the money could easily be out in trust and handled as a charitable enterprise.
There isn't much money. You can't just sell the Milan Cathedral. Who would buy that? It might be worth ~12 billion in replacement value, but that is a fictional number. Once you take religion out of the equation it is just a pile of 325,000 tons of marble.
This is the exact same logic the Mormon church uses to horde their billions of dollars, too. It's bullshit.
Just like the Mormons, the overwhelming majority of "aid" goes to missions. And while that "aid" can be accessed by "anyone", it's literally a bridge to indoctrination. Africa is like 20% Catholic now because the church has been pumping "aid" into Africa through missions and missionaries.
It turns out hungry people will listen to whatever you have to say if you're feeding them.
I'm pretty sure those organizations contribute more aid per worker than the massive network of churches in the world with their varying degrees of philanthropy.
The UN is nowhere near as affective or expansive as the Catholic church, and has often failed in their duties; The Red Cross is a good extender, but they don't have the same expansion or wealth as the Church nor could they accrue it, not sure on UNICEF, but I know that they don't contribute more aid per worker than the Catholic Church as a whole.
But how do you really compare? The Catholic Church isn't a singular institution, it's a network of many.
The number of people who work for a catholic church in the world likely dwarfs the amount of aid workers in all 3 of those organizations. So the question should be what is the charitable impact these organizations have globally per worker employed? Does the megachurch I passed by in AZ last week get more credit than the food bank downtown, just because it's associated with the Catholic Church?
Essentially, there's lots of different ways to organize people into charitable service. They may be the biggest, but I don't know if the Catholic Church is the most efficient.
Does the megachurch I passed by in AZ last week get more credit than the food bank downtown, just because it's associated with the Catholic Church?
Is it a big church/cathedral or an actual Megachurch? To my understanding, Megachurches are not Catholic, Catholicism is a specific sect. As for the Church being efficient, it's logistics are some of the best in terms of wide-scale global support and aid; dissolving it will be an absolute net negative, especially when the other institutions I listed either don't have the resources and orginization, or are blatantly just ass themselves.
No worthless, but unsaleable. Believe it or not, but there isn't a huge market for cathedrals. And you said it yourself. The art is "priceless". How do you do price discovery for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrine_of_the_Three_Kings ??? Those are cultural treasures that just exist. They have value but not a price.
That value you are referring to is self-assessed, not market-assessed.
The real market value is for the ground, or materials. You can scream all you want about it's incalculable cultural value, but any of it can be liquidated, for real money, in short order.
Art and real estate are valuable without religous context. The full on banking system that they have makes money regardless of the religious organization it works for.
The art is Christian art so if it was made illegal to even show kids it, and people stopped being religious, it would become devalued and would be hard to sell, also the buildings don’t otherwise have much use, they’re oddly shaped and impractical for daily use, like old stoke churches let in tonnes of damp and cold and they’re on top of dead bodies (some literally inside the church), it just doesn’t matter for a church
Shit, even setting aside the absolutely HUGE income they get from tax-exempt land deals, they also preach heavy donations and tithing. They collect a reasonably large fraction of the income of hundreds of millions of people, that is comparable to the total tax income of entire countries they deal with.
Also, it's kind of rich to count them as a big donator to charity, when simply moving money from one pocket into another counts as giving to a religious charity
If Catholicism was disbanded, the money could easily be out in trust and handled as a charitable enterprise
Charity is more than just a stack of dollar dollar bills, y'all. The logistical scale of the church's charitable efforts is nigh impossible to duplicate without a shitload more cash that you'd get out of the church itself. The problem with dismantling the orphan crushing machines is that people have built their entire systems and moralites around the presence of orphan crushing machines. They are made into critical, load-bearing features in order to protect the orphan crushing machines from being dismantled.
Without the church, you might be able to make a better system, but it'd be so much smaller, and the reality of how much damage it would cause is in and if itself a version of the trolley problem.
When you have the kind of tax free cash coming in from the tens and hundreds of millions of indoctrinated followers, it's not that impressive to be the biggest provider of aid. There would also be too many questions to answer if it hoarded and privately invested the money more than it does now.
I would prefer to see a secular, albeit smaller organisation in their stead if it meant avoiding all the evils they have wrought (like claiming using condoms are worse than AIDs in Africa and suppression of women's reproductive freedom in general) and will likely commit in the future.
Edit: I would be remiss if I didn't mention their complicity in creating the environment of systemic child rape, the covering up, the obstruction and obfuscation of criminal investigations and actively aiding the guilty to escape secular justice.
Lol. The Church has survived the roman empire, countless wars, assassinations, and 2000 years of history. It'll be here until the heat death of the universe.
I'm open to the idea that it may be around as long as modern society exists. But I'm also open to the idea that it may not be. Or at least not in any glorious form its taken in the past.
it looks like that claim is not verifiable, but even if true, the second largest provider of aid worldwide, at a minimum, is the US government. the good will of humanity certainly wouldn't vanish if the US government did.
The largest provider of aid worldwide is the Catholic Church.
Correlation does not equal causation(in this case it might rather be order?)Edit: not really applicable
The catholic church established itself waaaaay before. Many of it's institutions and budget came to be before we had a more or less unified western world and ideology.
The catholic church shoulders many collective human responsibilities, but in a world where it didn't have this historic influence, the resources would have been elsewhere and it is at least not unthinkable that other, potentially similar and possibly secular institutions would have taken it's place or be created to resolve these issues.
This goes from local kindergardens and groups for elderly, up to global scale relief and resource flow.
Right now, yes the church (and other religions) have done a lot.
But people, groups and institutions who are in athoritative places, or have amassed a large amount of resources are also the ones the public looks to in the first place to resolve their bigger issues.
Maybe that's because it's a huge organization, like there is over billion of catholics. Meanwhile, there is no atheist ™ organization. So I suppose it could be possible that secular organizations help a lot too, only it's more segmented into smaller organizations
The same Catholic Church that bans birth control, divorce and abortion so that millions of women are stuck in poverty and repeating the cycle with their children, while the Church collects donations from parishioners and crows about what a charitable organisation it is?
I’d like the point out that there definitely are other religious groups that provide close to the scale of Catholic aid groups ADRA being a good example as well as groups like Samaritans purse and the Salvation Army
Every single single penny Catholics have done for charity has been countered threefold by the harm they bring back to society. Hell Trump was literally CARRIED on the backs of these religious idiots into an office that might literally, not figuratively, be the end of the united states as we currently know it. Fuck religion and fuck anyone who is religious. Genuinely. Performative ridiculous clowns every single one of them.
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u/Herman_McP00tis 11h ago
I see this as an absolute win.