With banks in turmoil and Wall Street falling below 10,000 for the first time in four years, the risks of the constant pursuit of wealth have been starkly revealed. The crisis has prompted the Pope to pontificate about the pointlessness of chasing money.
The head of the Roman Catholic Church said that the disappearance of money as banks collapsed showed that wealth meant “nothing.”
The Pope said that people should instead base their lives on God’s word.
Those who think that “concrete things we can touch are the surest reality” are deceiving themselves, he said.
While I agree wholeheartedly with the Pope that building our lives on the shifting sands of the stock market is like chasing the wind—I can’t help but catch a whiff of hypocrisy in the pontiff’s words. According to Time magazine, the Vatican is a place of great—tax free—wealth.
Bankers’ best guesses about the Vatican’s wealth put it at $10 – $15 billion. Of this wealth, Italian stockholdings alone run to $1.6 billion, 15% of the value of listed shares on the Italian market. The Vatican has big investments in banking, insurance, chemicals, steel, construction, real estate. Dividends help pay for Vatican expenses and charities such as assisting 1,500,000 children and providing some measure of food and clothing to 7,000,000 needy Italians. Unlike ordinary stockholders, the Vatican pays no taxes on this income, which led the leftist Rome weekly L’Espresso last week to call it “the biggest tax evader in Italy.”
The Catholic Church certainly isn’t the only religious institution with a lot of money—many Protestant mega-church budgets could rival those of small states. Obviously, the Church pays out a lot in charity, just as other churches do—and they, too, can feel the sting of the market’s drop. It’s just hard to swallow a sermon from a religious leader about the futility of wealth when it’s delivered from his golden palace.
