Let’s say you go to church. And for the sake of argument let’s make it a Christian church of any denomination, Catholic, baptist, evangelical, some flavor of Protestant. You go once a week, maybe more and you put money in the little basket they pass around, perhaps just a few dollars, but it’s money just the same. In general, you see it as a humbling process and a tiny little step toward being a better person.

So what if the church doesn’t take the same humble approach and, rather, got rich – really, really rich – off the congregation’s contributions and the non-profit grants it got and the other fundraising efforts it made?

What if in addition to the nickels and dimes and dollars contributed by churchgoers, the church received hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. government?

And worst of all, what if your church took all of this money and spent it, not on the people of your congregation or the charitable causes the church espouses to, but on political activism?

Would it change the way you felt about going to church?
Would it change your philosophy about putting cash on the offertory plate?
Would it change the way you listen to pleas for cash (that seem to be made every week from the pulpit) from the ministers of your church?

Recently, I learned some interesting things about how money is spent in the Catholic church, and I’m sure the church-as-cash-machine is true of virtually every religious denomination.

The Vatican bank manages $7.3 billion in assets. Every Catholic parish in the United States has annual revenue of $695,291. If you multiply that by the over 17,000 parishes you get a sum of almost $12 billion a year. About 2/3rds of this comes from the collection plate. That’s a lot of money, but the typical parish still pleads poverty at every opportunity. And the money squeezed out of the parishioners is just the tip of the iceberg, here are a few examples.*

There’s something called Catholic Relief Services. Each year they distribute rice bowls through the parishes to feed the poor. They have an annual operating revenue of $979 million and the president of Catholic Relief Services earns yearly compensation of almost $500,000. Then there’s Catholic Charities, one of the biggest charities on earth with annual revenues of nearly $3.8 billion and thousands of full-time employees. Their charter is to “reduce poverty in America.”*

Both Catholic Relief Services and Catholic Charities (and these are but two of many examples) seem to be spending a lot of this money on subsidizing immigration, hundreds of thousands of immigrants.*

I wonder how a gigantic influx of poor people helps “reduce poverty in America”?

Anyway, churches are fallible, a human creation. A church isn’t God and God isn’t Catholic. In general, people will look very hard for reasons not to go to church and financial deception and corruptibility is a big juicy reason. The Catholic church asking me for money is like a millionaire standing outside of 7-Eleven asking fo change.

Taking $20 from your pocket each week and putting it on the collection plate, from all appearances, is an awful investment. The church doesn’t need the money and they’ll lie about how that money will be spent (your local minister likely won’t have a clue). It seems very likely that the Catholic church is a front for an investment conglomerate and a political action committee that wants to repopulate the dwindling ranks of American Catholics with the world’s poor (both legally and illegally).

For many reasons I still think there is something positive to be gained from going to church … just don’t bring any money.

*Source: Open Borders Inc.: Who’s Funding America’s Destruction? by Michelle Malkin

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