Pope Francis hits out at global 'cult of money'

[Xithras]

46. No, that's a myth.

The exact size of the gold repository is publicly known because it's actually controlled by the Vatican Bank, and they have opened their books in recent years to demonstrate compliance with EU banking laws. Yes, they really do have billions of dollars worth of gold, but very little of it is in the Vatican itself. In fact, the bulk of its gold is right here in the United States, where it's being held by the federal reserve for safekeeping. The U.S. federal reserve has the EXACT numbers and provided them to the EU.

Many of the assumptions of vast wealth are based on speculation from previous decades. Nobody knew how much gold the Catholic Church had, and it was obviously a wealthy institution, so people spun fantastic stories about the supposed "mountains of gold" under the Vatican. Once that veil was pulled back, it was found that they do indeed have a lot of gold, but you need to pull that zero off your $50 billion estimate to get its real value.

Oh, and most Catholics consider the "gold throne" thing to be anti-Catholic slander (ranks right up there with "money mad Jews" as a way to villify "greedy Catholics&quot . The chair is actually gold-guilded wood, and the sum of all the gold on the chair is probably worth a couple thousand dollars or so (the entire chair itself, for historical reasons alone, would obviously be worth considerably more to a private collector).