I wrote the following in response to a bit by Matthew Yglesias over at Slate on the wealth of the Church. (Aside: his last name in the byline of this article is bracing mild irony, no?) It's buried in the comment thread there, along with another comment that I post below. See the head of the next post for more commentary on that.
Here I skewer the stupid vulgarity of people who spew criticism at the Church for being rich, especially attacks on priests and bishops (note that secular/diocesan only earn between 20 and 30k a year in the United States, being the richest Catholic church on the planet, and religious/monastics usually receive much less than that) and the criticism that the "Church should sell all its priceless art to feed the poor."
My mom says that I shouldn't use the word idiot here. She's right, but it felt good to throw some skat back, you know? My comment:
The art and culture that is the Church's patrimony doesn't "belong to" the Church. It belongs to, and is meant to succor all humanity. It is merely the Church's gift to humanity. It doesn't belong in some rich jerk's private collection. It belongs where it is: In the case of the really historically significant stuff in the few museums and archives maintained, like national archives or museums, to edify us all. In the more significant case of the iconography common to our churches, it is meant to do what *we generation upon generation* of faithful have created it for: to help us worship the God who made us, and made all such beauty possible.
This lame argument, "that the priceless treasures" should be sold to feed the poor is exactly the line that hypocrite Judas fed Christ when the repentant woman poured her expensive unction on Christ's feet. All the rich schmuks who salivate at the idea of using their filthy lucre to collect the beauty of the Church to their own vanity use Judas's same argument. As if the Sistine Chapel and Chartes were created, and exist, to enrich the pope or something, and would be better used as the private preserve of billionaires who have truly *earned* it. That's intellectually and spiritually idiotic.
That beauty exists because we believe. Because the faithful have created it to worship God, and it is almost without exception freely accessible to anyone who cares to go seek it out. Rich or poor. I've been to hundreds of Catholic churches, and the only one I ever paid to enter was the Sistine Chapel, and that is not normally used for worship, and is effectively a museum. You will never pay to enter a Catholic church where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. That - the most important presence in the world, as sacred as we human beings ourselves - can be encountered for free everywhere.
Because the poor need beauty too, and we the Church give it to them.
As for the idea that the Church is merely a charity, it's not. But its charitable works are greater by far than any other organization in the world. We feed, teach, and heal the poor, and rich, everywhere they come to us.
There is corruption, but it is - in the context and scale of the work - small. The idea that the Congress should confiscate the wealth of the Church - which is mostly in real estate, most of that for charity or worship - is risible. The Congress is far more corrupt than the Church, financially. Anyone who thinks the rich buying our patrimony, or the government spending it for us is a good idea is simply an idiot.
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