Basic reading - Understanding the Church and Money
In an exceptionally revealing fashion John Allen moves beyond myths and provides facts and context of the Church and Money as well as the religious state of the world today.
- What is the financial footprint of the Church in the USA?
- How much money do the Bishops actually control?
- How do the cumulative budgets of dioceses, parishes, Catholic Hospitals, Catholic institutions of higher education and Catholic Charities compare with one another?
As a bonus to this article he writes “Third, the international polling outfit WIN-Gallup International has released a new global survey that shows atheism is on the rise, but 59 percent of the world’s population still describes itself as “religious.””
Taken together, the results seem to debunk two persistent myths about global religion:
- Atheism is mostly a Western phenomenon. Instead, Asia is by far the world’s most atheistic continent, with China alone home to two-thirds of the roughly 900 million atheists on the planet.
- Christianity is in decline relative to other world religions, especially Islam. Instead, nine of the world’s 10 most religious nations are majority Christian, and people who self-identify as Christian are more likely to describe themselves as “religious” than Muslims (81 percent to 74 percent).
His statistics are quite revealing.
I suspect reading this article will change the perceptions of many people?
How do your perceptions measure up against what he presents.
Similar article in Economist
The Economist Estimates the Catholic Church Spent $171,600,000,000 in 2010
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2012/08/17/the-economist-estimates-the-catholic-church-spent-171600000000-in-2010/
Tags: Bishops, Islam, parish