Pope Francis ignites a revolt that will overthrow American capitalism

[whatthehey]

79. I'm not sure what the value of their holdings has to do with it though

And I would have to see details to believe that the church has so little, as I'm certainly not going to subscribe to get past the headlines, which seem suspiciously focused on local Italian financial investments. Its land holdings alone are immense, with huge buildings in most of the world's most expensive cities, cascading down to thousands and thousands of large mostly wasted space buildings near the centers of the vast majority of towns in the western nations and beyond. I've seen the public parts of the Vatican art galleries and museums and am pretty damn sure that when middling Rembrandts or Picassos go for nine figures apiece, the huge number of Renaissance masterpieces those public rooms contain are alone worth more than 15B.

But let's pretend the RCC only has 15B. That has bugger all to do with how they enable, nay create poverty and human misery. Keeping wealth that could be shared is only a temporary and trivial tweak to anti-poverty efforts. Even if the RCC gave away ten times that lowball number, $150B, that would give less than $50 to every poor person om earth. And while that would feed an impoverished child in the Sao Paolo slums for quite some time, it would not make a lasting dent in poverty en masse (pun intended). I'm not going to be a hypocrite and suggest that the RCC can alleviate poverty in total when I don't make the same claims about other wealthy organizations.

But what they CAN do is stop relentless opposition to things that could make a lasting difference, like birth control and reproductive choice. Few things are more strongly correlated with poverty than early and large numbers of childbirths, which is exactly what the church demands in its relentless and futile drive to stop the drop in its waning flock of adherents, and more important, donors. This pressure is much more successful among the most vulnerable populations, those who are already poor, undereducated and with limited access to alternatives. And guess what? More poor babies to more poor parents does far far more to entrench and create poverty than not selling a few million FIAT shares and the occasional Titian and chucking a few crumbs to the local gamins.