Churches

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Our church has no building. We rent a not-so-nice hall on Sunday mornings, serve coffee and rusks, chat loudly to each other and then sit down to a service. The focus of our church is on community service, community service and community service. 50% of all the collections and donations are given back to the community. Be it for cars that need fixing, rent that needs paying, school fees that are behind or food that needs buying.

What if all churches worked on this principle? Fuelled by this thought I tried in vain to analyse the financial jargon available from the Vatican, as a starting point. I gathered that the Holy See is not doing to well since they barely broke even until as recently as 2006 and almost went under in 1998. It’s difficult to comment unless you are an auditor but even a pleb like me has to frown at the staggering 7 million Euros that was spent in 2005 on the funeral of Pope John Paul II and the election of his successor. I think that money probably could have fed a large chunk of Africa.

I further gathered that the papacy will be increasingly strapped for cash unless they find new sources of revenue. Back in 2005 the yearly contributions from other catholic churches ran at about 80 million Euros and from individual catholics at about 49 million which was apparently not a lot of money or enough money for that matter. And since the Vatican has a policy of NEVER selling any of its art no money is coming from there its treasures of which there are many.

The Vatican is affiliated to many charities and international programmes and I am sure that they give as much as they can. The rest of the world’s hungry will have to look elsewhere though.. it ain’t coming from Rome!