Which means grains of salt and skepticism, not outright discarding. Truth stands on its own regardless of the speaker. Otherwise it's ad hominem.
This is not a scientific journal. There is no such thing as an "invalid source", there are only things that are true and things that are not, plain and simple.
The lengths people will go to in order to avoid validating a piece of data is truly staggering..
A source like Chick is invalid, plain and simple. It's like asking Hitler about Jews - some of what he says might be accurate, but you're not going to cite him ever on it.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,833509,... says the Vatican's wealth is $10-15 billion. I suspect their total net worth is hard to calculate given that much of what they have is priceless - it'd be hard to put a price tag on St. Peter's Basilica.
There, was that so hard? Googling 'Vatican net worth' and choosing any of several substantially-agreeing links. Sorry I picked the wrong one, but the conclusion is the same: the Vatican is a multi-billion dollar operation.
While I agree with the conclusion, I disagree with the method:
googling for something and choosing from one of several "agreeing" links doesn't actually protect you from being wrong, if most of those links got their wrong data from the same original source.
Appeal to authority plus ad hominem against said authority leaves us back where we started, which was lack of verifiable evidence to support the assertion.
In lieu of accounting statements from the worldwide Catholic Church and its executive offices in the Vatican, we must necessarily make reasonable implications from the information that is available.
The Catholic Church has hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures. The Vatican has control over some portion of church revenues. It also has a publicly verifiable collection of religion-inspired artwork on display. It owns territory near a major European capital as independently sovereign territory, which is also a major tourist destination. Its subordinate entities in foreign jurisdictions have been the beneficiaries of legacies, escheat, and estate bequests for literally centuries, while largely benefiting from favorable treatment from the secular authority in majority Christian territory.
While the Vatican itself may not have direct and absolute ownership over the assets of the Church, it does have significant control over them. You don't have to be a cardinal to know that the Vatican archivists probably don't absolutely need to solicit direct donations for historical preservation.
But the Church is also a massive worldwide bureaucracy. The archivists may, in fact, find it far easier to fund their work via direct donations than by competing with all the other things the Church tries to do. Having theoretical access to a budget does not always mean you can actually spend the cash in a timely or expedient fashion.
Ethically speaking, I'm confident the archivists mean well, but they will essentially be proving that the Vatican can get additional revenue by holding the deteriorating old documents in its collection for ransom. We have as much reason to donate to them for this as we do to donate money to ExxonMobil to check that their pipelines running through wilderness areas are not leaking oil into them. If they can't maintain their own property, maybe they should be selling it to someone who can. There are plenty of museums and universities that would love to help in that way.
> The Catholic Church has hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures.
The Catholic Church is not a single expending entity.
> The Vatican has control over some portion of church revenues.
The portion the Vatican has control over are the Vatican's own revenues, including things like the Peter's Pence and the surplus returned by the Institute for Religious Works to the Vatican each year. This is in something like the low hundreds of millions annually, which isn't exactly something to sneeze at, but quite a lot of the existing operations would need to be curtailed to support the digitization of the library holdings without a separate revenue stream for that purpose.
> While the Vatican itself may not have direct and absolute ownership over the assets of the Church, it does have significant control over them.
It really doesn't. I mean, I suppose that in theory the Pope could simply start deposing bishops that refused demands to turn over local assets to the Vatican for its use, but there wouldn't be a global Church very long if that happened.
The church sometimes acts like 3000 separate entities, and sometimes acts like one monolithic entity, according to whichever is most convenient. When I apply the duck test, it quacks.
Yes, in theory, the Pope could suggest that preservation of historic documents in the Vatican archives might be an important issue for the church, and the nearly 3000 bishops could all ignore him without consequence. If he made an appeal to a billion people, there is a possibility no one would listen. Not. Bloody. Likely.
Again, I say that if the church cannot preserve its own property, it should sell some of the collection to support the rest, preferably to an entity whose primary mission is the preservation and dissemination of knowledge, rather than the dignity and tradition of a religion.
The call for donations to support the particular project is the way the Church makes appeals to "a billion people". Its how the Church funds pretty much everything it does, from a new roof for a parish church to missionary work to the much of the annual operation of the Holy See (through the Peter's Pence). So, this is no different from how the Church takes care of any of its property.
Local improvements are funded locally, an that's great. But a large project managing the church's closely-held fabulous wealth is a very different matter. Never mind my neighbor donates to the Fireman's ball; he wants me to help put sprinklers in his art gallery, I laugh.
We don't actually know the extent of the Vatican's wealth. It keeps that as secret as it is able, even from Catholics. We can see what it reveals to the public, and make implications from what it buys and sells outside its own closed economy. From what I can actually see, the Vatican is at least as wealthy as the parent entity of a multinational corporation, and possibly as wealthy as some other monarchies in Europe. I cannot even guess at what might be in its sovereign investment funds since World War 2. By the standards of absolutely everyone I have ever met in my entire lifetime, the Vatican is rich--and not just "country club" rich, but "if they actually cared to open the books, Forbes would put them on a list" rich. I don't know how high they might be on that list, but they would definitely be on it.
And a rich man should not be passing the hat to get enough money to polish his own silver.
