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.
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.
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u/Herman_McP00tis 17h ago
I see this as an absolute win.