18 Jul 22
@ogb saidIt looks like he has a net worth of about 2 million. Very comfortable, but not super wealthy.
the ring on his finger is valued around $800,000 😀 plus there's more
https://www.olvchicago.org/church-blog/how-wealthy-is-the-catholic-church.html
https://networthbro.com/pope-francis-net-worth/[WORD TOO LONG].
@ogb saidWhen I was working for a diocese of the Catholic Church in a remote part of eastern Indonesia in the early 1990s, it was running free hospitals and clinics, schools and colleges, orphanages, dormitories in towns for students from rural areas, it was funding internships and apprenticeships, programmes for the physically and mentally disabled, and teacher training programmes.
the ring on his finger is valued around $800,000 😀 plus there's more
https://www.olvchicago.org/church-blog/how-wealthy-is-the-catholic-church.html
Added to all that there was accommodation and care for old people, halfway houses, counselling and legal support for victims of rape and domestic violence, adoption and fostering schemes, immunization programmes, preventative health schemes, midwives, post-natal care, water and sanitization programmes, scholarships and grants at all levels, and they were sending children from poor families to universities elsewhere in the country, and so on and so forth.
Whatever the criticisms and weaknesses and excesses of the Catholic Church were back then - and I was acutely aware of them - yeah, I don't know why the Pope has a USD800k ring, etc. - but whatever the legitimate complaints were, the amount of money they had available for dealing with poverty in my global backwater in a common-sense and compassionate way was not one of them.
18 Jul 22
@ogb saidThe ring is valued thus not by its inherent worth, but since some people would be ready to pay that amount. But as soon as the Pope would wear a new ring each day to sell off the valuable one, the price would come down real quick.
the ring on his finger is valued around $800,000 😀 plus there's more
https://www.olvchicago.org/church-blog/how-wealthy-is-the-catholic-church.html
The pope himself is not rich, the church is.
There is that old joke:
The is a conclave and all the cardinals arrive one after another in big and expensive cars.
Two non-catholics see it from over the road and one says to the other: "If you consider they started with one measly donkey all that time back...."
@ogb saidA fictional number for insurance purposes.
the ring on his finger is valued around $800,000 😀 plus there's more
https://www.olvchicago.org/church-blog/how-wealthy-is-the-catholic-church.html
In one sense the Pope is rich enough to have any material comfort he might desire. But in another sense, he so impoverished that he cannot walk into any gelateria in Rome and get himself a vanilla cone.
19 Jul 22
The post that was quoted here has been removedAs a Christian, I believed that Jesus "saved" people - not me - because he overcame death and paid the price for everyone's "sins" through his sacrifice [the atonement] and then, importantly, his resurrection.
I was simply a Christian who worked for a project funded by the Catholic Church [via its local diocese] on the edge of a tropical forest wilderness. I wasn't Jesus.