September 27, 2015:
Pope Francis Wants To Be President of the World
Posted: 09/24/2015
WASHINGTON -- He hasn't announced his candidacy.
Indeed, the job he seeks doesn't really exist.
But shrewdly, methodically and with a showman's flair, the soft-spoken, 78-year-old Argentinian Jesuit priest named Jorge Mario Bergoglio -- Pope Francis -- showed Thursday that he is running to become president of the planet.
He did so in a congressional ceremony of secular civic pomp in a massive legislative building that, after all, harks back to ancient Rome.
As devout as he is, and as focused on the faith and practice of the Catholic Church, Francis is also campaigning to lead public, secular, political discourse worldwide. He is arguing that the two realms of faith and politics are one, and that the moral and spiritual teachings of faith should inform and guide political decisions for "our common home."
This is not a new idea, but it seems again a timely one. Francis' own church sorely needs the refreshing input of world opinion. Secular leaders, meanwhile, are reviled and government itself seems to have lost any sense of moral purpose.
With the rope-line skills of Bill Clinton and the stagecraft mastery of Ronald Reagan, Francis is selling himself and his message in Washington like the political master that he is.
Click on Link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pope-francis-world-leader_56041e79e4b00310edfa4d0f
Wealth of Roman Catholic Church impossible to calculate
Kristopher Morrison | March 8, 2013
| COMMENT: Pope Francis has said that corporate thinking is unhealthy and greedy. Perhaps the largest Corporation in the world today might need to heed his counsel. |
It is impossible to calculate the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church. In truth, the church itself likely could not answer that question, even if it wished to.
Its investments and spending are kept secret. Its real estate and art have not been properly evaluated, since the church would never sell them.
There is no doubt, however, that between the church’s priceless art, land, gold and investments across the globe, it is one of the wealthiest institutions on Earth.
Since 313 A.D., when Catholicism became the official religion of the Roman Empire, its power has been in near-constant growth.
The church was able to acquire land, most notably the Papal States surrounding Rome, convert pagan temples and claim relics for itself. Over 300 years, it became one of Europe’s largest landowners.
For the next thousand years, tithes and tributes flowed in from all over Europe. Non-Christians and even fellow Christians were killed and their property confiscated. For example, the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople in the early 13th century brought it gold, money and jewels.
Click on Link:
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/wealth-of-roman-catholic-church-impossible-to-calculate
How Rich Is the Catholic Church?
March 14 2013 2:41 PM
Pope Francis is not just the spiritual leader of one of the world’s major religions: He’s also the head of what’s probably the wealthiest institution in the entire world. The Catholic Church’s global spending matches the annual revenues of the planet’s largest firms, and its assets—huge amounts of real estate, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Vatican City, some of the world’s greatest art—surely exceed those of any corporation by an order of magnitude.*
But it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to understand exactly how rich the church is. That’s in part because church finances are complicated. But it’s also because, in the United States at least, churches in general are exempted from the financial reporting and disclosure requirements that otherwise apply to nonprofit groups. And it turns out, that exemption may have undesirable consequences.
The main thing we know about Catholic Church finance is that in cash flow terms, the United States is by far the most important branch. America is a rich country with a large population of Catholics. What’s more, America’s Catholic population is a religious minority. That’s meant that, rather than using political clout to influence the shape of mainstream government institutions, as in an overwhelmingly Catholic country such as Brazil, the Catholic Church in the United States has created a parallel state: a vast web of schools, hospitals, universities, and charities that serve millions of clients.
Our best window into the overall financial picture of American Catholicism comes from a 2012 investigation by the Economist, which offered a rough-and-ready estimate of $170 billion in annual spending, of which almost $150 billion is associated with church-affiliated hospitals and institutions of higher education. The operating budget for ordinary parishes, at around $11 billion a year, is a relatively small share, and Catholic Charities is a smaller share still.
Apple and General Motors, by way of comparison, each had revenue of about $150 billion worldwide in Fiscal Year 2012. Legally speaking, there is no such thing as “the Catholic Church,” which is why these finances get so complicated. As far as the law is concerned, each diocese is a separate legal entity, incorporated in the states where it operates. Generally speaking, they are organized as what’s known as a corporation sole—a legal corporation wholly controlled by the individual bishop rather than a board of directors—and not officially part of any larger transnational spiritual organization. This has led to conflicts during the sex abuse scandals. Lawsuits have caused disputes about how deep the church’s pockets go and who should pay.
Click on Link:
The Great Vatican-Jesuit Global Depression
Part 1 - Global Financial Crisis of 2008
| COMMENT: This is an incredible exhaustive work that deals with the accumulated wealth of the Catholic Church. This is Part 1 of 5 parts. It is entirely worth your reading. |
The clear, unmistakable and uncontestable truth concerning the Roman Catholic Church is that for 1,000 years it has been the most dominant organization on the planet, during which time it virtually owned directly or indirectly the whole or the majority of wealth of Europe.
For the four hundred years up until the last century, it was well recognized that the Roman Catholic Church also owned and controlled vast wealth and people of the Americas including large parts of South-East Asia and Africa.
Again, let us be absolutely clear on this. The Catholic Church for the past 1,000 years was the indisputable largest economic entity of humanity history. No other nation, corporation or group of families came anywhere close. For centuries, the Church and the Popes had unfettered access to the plunder of Islamic countries, of the ancient Celts and Saxons, of ancient Greek, of ancient Egypt, of the entire fortunes of gold of the Americas, of the mines and civilizations of Africa.
As the largest economic entity of history for over 1,000 years, the Roman Catholic Church dominated ever single class of assets, not just gold and minerals. Its property holdings were by fare the largest of any economic entity in Europe, let alone conquered lands. Its holdings of art and precious artifacts was and is unheralded.
The Roman Catholic Church was a founder in virtually every historic major enterprise created out of states under its influence. It had holdings in new corporations from trading companies to banks and then major industries were unmatched.
So wealthy was the Roman Catholic Church for over 1,000 years that even if it hired every single person on the planet in 1800 as an employee and paid them in gold coins, it had enough gold reserves to keep everyone gainfully employed for centuries.
