A HOUSE IN ORDER

They’re currently electing a new Pope.

So I looked at some facts.

According to Avro Manhattan, in his book: ‘The Vatican Billions’, The Vatican has “…large investments with the Rothschilds, with the Hambros Bank and Credit Suisse. In the United States it has large investments with the Morgan Bank, the Chase-Manhattan Bank, and the First National Bank of New York to name but a few. Billions of shares are held in the most powerful international corporations such as Gulf Oil, Shell, and General Motors; in fact the wealth of the Vatican in the U.S. alone is greater than that of the five wealthiest giant corporations put together…

…The Vatican's treasure of solid gold has been estimated by the United Nations World Magazine to amount to several billion dollars. A large bulk of this is stored in gold ingots with the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, while banks in England and Switzerland hold the rest. That doesn’t include all the art, real estate, property, stocks and shares it holds.”  

Let us not forget that the Catholicism became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 313 A.D., since when its power has been in near-constant growth. For more than a thousand years, tithes and tributes flowed in from all over Europe. Non-Christians and even fellow Christians were killed and their property confiscated.

The Roman Catholic Church is now a greater possessor of material riches than any other single institution, corporation, bank, giant trust, government or state of the whole globe. The Pope therefore, as the visible ruler of this immense wealth, is consequently the richest individual of the twenty-first century. I know, much like our Queen, he doesn't exactly own it, but nonetheless, he could alter its distribution.

In the last few years more than $2 Billion dollars has been paid out as settlements by the church for sex-abuse allegations in the United States alone. Less than a tenth of its current wealth is ever used on humanitarian projects such as disaster relief, medical aid, and help to the poor in developing nations, children and refugees.

Funnily enough, the Catholic Church considers the “excessive accumulation of wealth by a few” to be a mortal sin. And yet half the world's population starve.

Long live The Pope!