> This is an interesting case where it's hard to separate rationality from human nature.
The Roman Catholic Church has had this thing sewn up for at least a millennium. Giving large amounts of money to the church on your deathbed is a surefire way to open the gates of heaven, or so I'm told.
Maybe in the time of the Medicis. The Roman Catholic Church doesn't give much of a fuck whether you give them a dime today. It's not that kind of organization.
Haha. That's so funny. You should have been around when my grandmother died. They took her for a pretty penny. Not that I care because I didn't want any money from her anyway but they sure know who their marks are.
In Poland just about every interaction with the church has a price tag attached to it, ditto in Spain. There's a reason the Vatican is lined with gold and it has precious little to do with the Medicis and everything to do with tithe, real estate, compound interest and outright scams.
jacquesm is right, the Polish church is a complete racket. A small example—my father wanted to be buried in the family crypt in Warsaw. This meant having to pay off his parish (he was not a churchgoer, but everyone is assigned a parish), and then pay off the parish the cemetery was in to allow the transfer (in addition to all the regular burial fees).
The most popular conservative priest in Poland drives a Maybach.
Priests in Poland will go door to door once or twice a year basically collecting envelopes. Not paying them complicates your life.
Not as bad as in Romania, but there it is the Orthodox church rather than the Roman Catholic one. They're spending 100 million euros fleeced from some of the poorest people in the EU on a new church right now just to it will be the biggest in a country that could really use that money in better ways.
I can't speak to the Catholic church in Poland; if you say so, I believe you. Then I'd just say: you mean the Polish Roman Catholic Church, not the Roman Catholic Church in general.
I feel confident that old ladies in Poland are not gilding the Vatican, which, FWIW, is worth less than 1/8th a single Jeff Bezos. (I, too, would be happier if that number were even lower, since it contradicts some of the better-known values of the religion).
Bezos' worth is paper, the Vatican has billions in cash, that's outside of all its other holdings in stocks, real estate and so on.
They pull in 100's of millions per week, now obviously lots of that is spent again but plenty of it flows upwards.
I don't think there is any proper accounting of the true worth of the Vatican other than what slips out and the official reporting by the Vatican bank.
Personally I'd be happy if the whole thing went bust but they keep finding new people to fleece so it will be a while. Get them while they're young... It's remarkably effective, once brainwashed as a child it takes a very strong person to break out of that stuff.
It's interesting how accidents of birth tend to tie people to some religion (or none) and then that becomes a defining part of their identity to the point where they can no longer separate from it. And so if you're born in Pakistan chances are large that you will feel like the Muslim religion is the one and true and when you're born in Ireland it will likely be Catholicism or Protestantism (but the dividing line between those two is - unless you're part of either - for non-religious people roughly the same as between Orthodox verions of that same religion, in other words, all followers of Jesus in some variation).
Born to Jewish parents Judaism is very likely to be your religion and so on. That alone should make you wonder how much of this is free choice and how much of it is indoctrination. Maybe we'll kick the religion virus one day but I'm not too hopeful it will happen.
Then a whole bunch of old guys in robes and people speaking with great authority on subjects they could not possibly know anything about will have to find some new way of conning people.
I don't know what most of this is meant to persuade me of, but I will say that when people estimate the value of the Vatican, they're not just basing that on the cash in the Vatican Bank.
The Roman Catholic Church has had this thing sewn up for at least a millennium. Giving large amounts of money to the church on your deathbed is a surefire way to open the gates of heaven, or so I'm told.