The Economist has a story assembling hard figures and best guesses on the size and state of the complex, opaque finances of the Catholic Church. Some figures from the report:
- 6,800 is the number of Catholic schools in America (5% of the national total)
- 630 is the number of Catholic hospitals (11% of the national total) plus a similar number of smaller health facilities
- 244 is the number of Catholic colleges and universities.
- Seven of the leading 25 part-time law school programmes in America are Catholic
- A quarter of the 100 top-ranked hospitals are Catholic
- 1m peopler are estimated to work for Catholic institutions (Wal-Mart employs about 2m)
- The church is the largest single charitable organisation in the country.
- 65,000 paid staff work for Catholic Charities
- 10m people are aided by Catholic Charities each year
- $4.7 billion was given to the poor by Catholic Chariteis in 2010
- 62% of that came from local, state and federal government agencies
The Economist estimates the following financial breakdown for the Church:
- $170 billion is the estimated expenditure of church entities in 2010
- 57% of this goes on health-care networks
- 28% goes to colleges
- 6% to parish and diocesan day-to-day operations
- 2.7% to national charitable activities
- $10 per week is the estimated contribution of American Catholics
Americans are the financial backbone of the global church:
- 60% of the global church’s wealth comes from the United States
- The United States is the largest contributor to Rome, ahead of Germany, Italy and France. Everything from renovations to St Peter’s Basilica to funding for the Pontifical Gregorian University is largely paid for with American money.
The piece is colored by the irritable narrowness the Economist sometimes falls into when examining institutions motivated by non-economic considerations, but its broad call for greater financial transparency strikes me as a good one. Here is yet another task for today’s church.
Update: Mark Gray notes a major error: “I’ve examined the math a bit more in The Economist piece and discovered a significant problem. The story overestimates annual Catholic Church offertory by $4.6 billion or 50% because they assume Mass-attendingindividuals give an average of $10 per week (for data see pg. 43) rather than households.”
August 20th, 2012 | 12:13 pm
The Economist’s editors have already indicated they do not understand the Catholic Church in other articles. One, in particular, expressed surprise that the Pope believed in a “personal God”. A reader’s letter, that they did publish to their credit, summed it nicely: “Let me let you in on a little Vatican secret: the Pope is Catholic.”
Given that, perhaps this attempt at objectivity is the best they can do and a decent contribution to what the Catholic Church needs to bear in mind at all levels. If only the editors didn’t feel the need to compare the Church to a large corporate entity and had avoided the tendentious title.
August 20th, 2012 | 4:20 pm
[...] on the Economist report about the Catholic Church’s finances in the U.S. (Matthew Schmitz highlighted the story earlier today.) Gray argues that the piece shows a “lack of understanding of what the Church is as an [...]
August 21st, 2012 | 9:47 am
The church should not have “opaque finances.”
It’s one thing to ask the faithful to trust the church on spiritual matters, where the church can at least make a claim that it has special insights / divine protection from error.
The church can make no such claim about finances, so standard rules of prudence should apply. In this context that means the Catholic Church’s finances should be open and audited by an independent entity.
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