Pope Francis ignites a revolt that will overthrow American capitalism

[pnwmom]

48. The Pope/Vatican still won't own Notre Dame or any of the other valuable properties they don't own now.

And there have already been orders of nuns that left the Church and took their property with them. It has happened and could happen again.

http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/vatican-city-jason-berry-holy-see-looming-inquisition-reveals-fractured-catholic-church

In the early 1950s, Holy Wisdom Monastery was a Catholic girls’ school run by the Sisters of St. Benedict. In time, the school closed, and in 1966 the sisters, spurred on by the reformist ideals of the Second Vatican Council, transformed it into a retreat center, one that thrived in the confident spirit of a church opening its windows to the modern world — the metaphor used by Pope John XXIII in summoning the world’s bishops to the council in Rome.

In the 1990s, the nuns there established a strong interfaith spirit, they undertook a rigorous environmental effort toward “sustainability’ and they welcomed gay couples into the church and its services. By the year 2000, the nuns transformed the monastery into an ecumenical institution, welcoming a Presbyterian woman minister. And that was the point at which they crossed an irreversible line. Having a Protestant woman ministering in the community threw their identity as a Catholic women’s order into question.

The sisters decided to leave the diocese and end their formal affiliation with the Catholic Church. As they saw it, they were maintaining the monastic ideal of Benedictine spirituality by opening the place to others. In the process of leaving the Catholic Church, the nuns made their own power move, of sorts. They held onto the deed to the land with the position that their faith community was true to the interfaith spirit of Vatican II. Their message, though never formally stated, was sledgehammer blunt: the male hierarchy has gone backwards and we’re moving forward. They quite literally held their ground.

Here's something else you might not know if you haven't studied church history. The Church is barred by the Concordat that established Vatican City from selling off the artworks held there. They are essentially kept in trust there for the benefit of all Europe.

And I'd rather they keep those artworks safe and open for public viewing than sell them to the Trumps and Kochs of the world.

http://caritasetveritas.com/2013/03/the-myth-of-vatican-wealth-on-helping-the-poor/

Vatican City as its own independent nation state was created through a concordat with Italy in 1929 (the Lateran Concordat), which made Vatican City the smallest territorial state in the world. Article 18 of that concordat states the following: “The artistic and scientific treasures existing within the Vatican City and the Lateran Palace shall remain open to scholars and visitors, although the Holy See shall be free to regulate the admission of the public thereto” (you can read the concordat online here: http://biblelight.net/treaty.htm). The Holy See would automatically violate its right to be sovereign if it overstepped these bounds. That is, since the property, art, etc., are seen to be the patrimony of all of Europe, and the Italian state obviously has concern for it, Italy would be well within its legal rights to take the Vatican back should the pope ever try to sell the Vatican property or artistic (etc.) patrimony (each part of which is officially labeled as worth one euro each)—which the pope cannot legally do.