All Things Finance - Money & Politics (2024)

FAQs

How much gold does the Catholic Church own? ›

The Vatican Bank manages $64 billion of assets on behalf of its 17,400 customers, according to a Dec. 5, 2014, article in International Business Times . The bank owns $764 million in equity. The bank keeps gold reserves worth over $20 million with the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Intelligence reports, which corroborated the Bigelow Report, also suggested that more than 200 million Swiss francs, a sum largely in gold coins, were eventually transferred to Vatican City or to the Vatican Bank, with the assistance of Roman Catholic clergy and the Franciscan Order.

And last year, the Vatican's former finance minister, Father Juan Antonio Guerrero Alves, spoke with the Vatican News about the Holy See's financial statements for 2021, revealing that it had 3.9 billion euros in total assets. Adjusted for 2023 dollars, that's almost $5 billion.

Although money is no longer backed by gold, governments still store vast amounts of bullion to protect against hyperinflation or other economic shocks. The United States holds the world's largest stockpile of gold reserves by a considerable margin of over 8,100 tons.

The United States has the most gold reserves and has nearly as many reserves as the combined total of the next three countries with the largest gold holdings: Germany, Italy, and France.

The United States has the largest gold reserve, with more than 8,000 metric tons of gold. This was more than twice the gold reserves of Germany and more than three times the gold reserves of Italy and France.

The Vatican's economy is shrouded in secrecy, with some believing its financial numbers are more general than accurate. The Holy See is the governing body of the nation and generates money through donations; it then invests a portion of that money in stocks, bonds, and real estate.

No one knows exactly how much land the church owns because while the institution is centralized in terms of its doctrine, legally, it is quite diffuse. The Vatican doesn't actually own church buildings in, say, Vermont or California. Decisions about acquisition or disposition are largely made at the diocesan level.

The Vatican hopes to use the money gained from these donations and its other business ventures to help the poor, provide medical aid to those in need through their many hospitals, and continue to spread their religion to more and more people around the world.

How much does the pope get paid? ›

Popes usually get paid hendsomely, the current wage he gets is $32,000 on a monthly basis but he refused to get any of that money. Instead, Pope Francis decided to either donate this money to the church, use it to endow a foundation, placed in trust or pass it on to a family member.

This was primarily due to the decreasing price of gold, a valuable and largely held asset of the Catholic Church, not only in the form of gold bars but also in the massive amounts of precious metals that can be found in artifacts and buildings owned by the church.

The Catholic Church owns an estimated 177 million acres around the world, which makes them by far the largest landowners on Earth. In second place is Canada's Inuit people who own 87 million acres spread across Nunavut (Northwest Territory), Yukon and Northwest Territories in Canada as well as Alaska and Greenland.

Though it's called “Vatican City,” it is actually its own sovereign country with its own post office, laws, and mint, where it prints its own currency called Vatican lira. While the City's borders boast just over 100 acres of land and just under 1,000 citizens, it is often called the richest country in the world.