What is Church’s Overall Wealth?

by Letters Editor · November 7, 2017

Geoff Harris, Rooiels, Western Cape – According to your front page article “Church groups dump fossil fuel”, 40 Catholic institutions are going to dump more than $5 trillion of “fossil fuel” investments (presumably stocks and shares) because they are taking a moral stand against the industry whose “business model is not aligned with a healthy climate and a sustainable society”.

No problem with the moral stance, but are there not other moral values involved here? What might these figures reveal about the Church’s wealth, and how it is being used to show the love of Christ?

Arguably it would be prudent that such “fossil fuel” investments not exceed 5% of a portfolio — let’s make that 10% to be on the conservative side. That would mean the other 90% of the portfolio would be 90 times $5 trillion. $450 trillion is a huge amount. And this is only 40 (out of how many?) Catholic institutions. And there are many other types of not-so-obvious accumulated wealth.

Is the Church Struggling or Not?

Yet we are led to believe that the Church is struggling financially and cannot even afford to assist hard-pressed parishes, let alone the poor and needy.

One can well imagine the magnitude of this wealth if, instead of only 40 Catholic institutions, there were (a more likely) 400 or 4000 institutions brought into the calculation.

Perhaps the “powers that be” can shed a different light on this disturbing insight?