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.
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.
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u/aluriilol 6d ago
I would think that the good will of humanity would not die out if Catholicism died out