The geographical center of the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican possesses many of the world’s most precious works of art, and it is believed by many to be the world’s wealthiest organization.
In a book on Vatican treasures, The Vatican Billions, Avro Manhattan noted, “The Catholic church is the biggest financial power, wealth accumulator and property owner in existence. She is a greater possessor of material riches than any other single institution, corporation, bank, giant trust, government or state of the whole globe. The pope, as the visible ruler of this immense amassment of wealth, is consequently the richest individual of the twentieth century. No one can realistically assess how much he is worth in terms of billions of dollars.”
According to the author, the Holy See maintained large investments with the Rothschilds of Britain, France and America, the Hambros Bank, and Credit Suisse in London and Zurich. In the United States, it has holdings with the Morgan Bank, the Chase-Manhattan Bank, First National Bank of New York, the Bankers Trust Company, and others. Among its investments are billions of shares in the most powerful international corporations. such as Gulf Oil, Shell, General Motors, General Electric, IBM, and others. A conservative estimate set the amount of investments at more than $500 million in the United States alone.
In a recent statement published in connection with a bond prospectus, the Boston archdiocese listed its assets at $635,891,004, which was 9.9 times its liabilities. This left a net worth of $571,704,953. “It is not difficult to discover the truly astonishing wealth of the church,” said Manhattan, “once we add the riches of the twenty-eight archdioceses and 122 dioceses of the U.S.A., some of which are even wealthier than that of Boston. Some idea of the real estate and other forms of wealth controlled by the Catholic Church may be gathered by the remark of a member of the New York Catholic Conference, that his church ‘probably ranks second only to the United States government in total annual purchase.’”
These statistics indicated that the Roman Catholic Church, once all its assets have been calculated, was the most formidable stockbroker in the world. The Holy See, independently of each successive pope, was increasingly orientated toward the United States. An article in The Wall Street Journal said that the Vatican’s financial deals in the United States alone were so big that very often it sold or bought gold in lots of a million or more dollars at one time.
The Vatican ’s treasure of solid gold had been estimated by the United Nations World Magazine to amount to several billion dollars. A large bulk of this was stored in gold ingots with the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, while banks in Switzerland and England held the rest. The wealth of the Vatican in the United States alone was greater than that of the five wealthiest giant corporations of the country.
But in 1987, Fortune magazine reported, “For all its splendor, the Vatican is nearly broke.” The article noted, “Having survived barbarian invasions, persecutions, countless plagues, and occasional schisms, the papacy now faces a modern-day problem: a deep financial squeeze. The costs of the Vatican ’s growing bureaucracy far exceed its means.”
In the previous year, the Holy See took in $57.3 million from sources as diverse as fees for ceremonies; income from publications, newspaper ads, and the sale of videocassettes; and modest investment earnings of $18 million. With investments of some $500 million, the Vatican commanded fewer financial resources than many U.S. universities.
In the spring of 2008, the Vatican reported that its accountants had recorded a loss in its annual accounts for the first time in four years. The report said the Holy See lost nearly ten million euros after investing in dollars before the U.S. currency fell sharply against the euro. “And the hole in the budget would have been even worse,” said one source, “if the Church had not raised rents on its Rome properties, on which the Church does not pay property taxes to the Italian state.”
Rent hikes reportedly caused controversy in Rome where it was alleged that the Church had threatened to evict tenants who didn’t pay up. The loss was also attributed to poor performances by the Vatican ’s media operations, which included a newspaper and radio station. They lost approximately fifteen million euros in the pervious year. In 2007, the Vatican reported an overall income of 236.7 million euros, while expenses totaled 245.8 million euros.
Much of the Vatican ’s income comes from donations from church members around the world. American Catholics give about $80 million. Experts estimated that the Vatican ’s total wealth in 2008 was in excess of five billion euros ($5 billion).
Exactly how much wealth the Vatican has in banks and stock portfolios is a matter of debate, and the Holy See does not say. But money and investments do not constitute the total measure of the wealth of Vatican City. The Holy See owns the world’s greatest collection of art treasures. In museums, public displays, private chambers, marble corridors, churches, chapels, and St. Peter’s Basilica can be found paintings, frescoes, drawings, sculptures, and stained-glass windows created by the world’s greatest artists through centuries from the years before Christ to today.
“The first collection of antiquities in the world was made by Popes Julius II, Leo X, Clement VII, Paul III, and Pius V. Among these were the Torso of Heracles, the Belvedere Apollo, and the Laocoön. Clement XIV’s activity in collecting antiquities was continued by Pius VI with such great success that their combined collections…were united in one large museum…the Museo Pio-Clementino. It contains eleven separate rooms filled with celebrated antiquities.”
“The founding of the Vatican Museums can be traced back to 1503 when the newly-elected Pope Julius II della Rovere, placed a statue of Apollo in the internal courtyard of the Belvedere Palace built by Innocent VIII… Scores of artifacts were added throughout the centuries and the collections were eventually reorganized under Benedict XIV (1740-1758) and Pope Clement XIII (1758-1769). They founded the Apostolic Library Museums: the Sacred (Museo Sacro, 1756) and Profane (Museo Profano, 1767). The Christian Museum, comprising finds from the catacombs that could not be conserved in situ, was founded by Pius IX in 1854 in the Lateran Palace and was moved to the Vatican Museums by Pope John XXIII. Pope Pius XI inaugurated in 1932…the Vatican Picture Gallery (the Pinacoteca).”
Much of the Vatican ’s collection of treasures is open to the public in its many museums and within the Vatican in the form of art and sculpture. The most famous and popular are the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel, painted by Michelangelo, and his sculpture, the Pietà, depicting the Virgin Mary holding his crucified body, on display in the Pietà Chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica. Described by the Vatican as “probably the world’s most famous sculpture of a religious subject, it was carved when Michelangelo was twenty-four years old, and it is the only one he ever signed.
“With this magnificent statue Michelangelo has given us a highly spiritual and Christian view of human suffering,” noted a Vatican publication. “Artists before and after Michelangelo always depicted the Virgin with the dead Christ in her arms as grief stricken, almost on the verge of desperation. Michelangelo, on the other hand, created a highly supernatural feeling. As she holds Jesus’s lifeless body on her lap, the Virgin’s face emanates sweetness, serenity and a majestic acceptance of this immense sorrow, combined with her faith in the Redeemer. It seems almost as if Jesus is about to reawaken from a tranquil sleep and that after so much suffering and thorns, the rose of resurrection is about to bloom.”