Don Bosco Center in Tondo, Manila… empowering the youth, helping the poor.
Of course, true to form, the R media outfit again comes out with a stale story that asks a question that has long been answered ad nauseam. “How much money does the Catholic Church have?” Again, too, true to form, all the anti-Church bashers come out in full force from the woodworks seconding the motion and throwing in their even more stale and lame arguments against the Church. The lowest form of intelligence is contradiction, and coming out with a story that begs all the questions, in my book, is even lower. Why, these writers who call themselves journalists whose best obras are nothing but a pack of innuendoes based on ill-digested questionable “data” and produce not solid journalism but propaganda, are nothing less than despicable.
These are some things I would like at least my friends to know … 1) The Catholic Church is monolithic only in terms of dogma and moral issues, and in the way it runs its own internal affairs, its governance. There is no central financial institution that “owns” the assets that really belong to the people who comprise the particular churches called dioceses. Therefore, to talk about the “riches” of the Catholic Church is not the same as talking about assets owned by multinational firms like Shell, Enron, Microsoft, Apple, and countless others. Whilst the Church at large owns assets like the buildings and works of art found in the Vatican, said assets are not translatable to cold cash, for one simple reason … they are a patrimony of the human family as a whole. The Church safeguards it, but in the name of the whole human family. No single Pope owned it solo. No single cardinal can do with it what he wants. 2) Every diocesan Bishop is sovereign in his own diocese. Whilst every diocese, again, owns assets, those same assets are just in the name of the corporation sole which is the Diocesan Bishop. Some dioceses are relatively well-to-do, but not rich. Most are poor and struggling, especially those in the rural areas. 3) It is stupid to count the buildings owned by religious orders and congregations and diocesan clergy in their schools, hospitals, orphanages and other mostly charitable institutions as “riches” at least in the way the world defines them. They are assets alright on paper, but they cannot be liquidated without doing immense and incalculable harm to the dependents they feed, clothe, and house, and/or educate or heal in clinics and hospitals. I speak for my own congregation. We have buildings and assets, and not one of them belongs to anyone of us. Again, they belong to the “corporation” that is the congregation, and we cannot sell those assets for pure personal gain without doing harm to the mission we do as educators. 4) Those who continue to harp on the number of hospitals that they impute mistakenly to the “Church” and interpret them as worldly assets do not have the faintest understanding of religious life and religious culture and its life of mission. The Church does NOT, I repeat, DOES NOT build hospitals in the same way and motivation that MVP would build one. When businessmen build a hospital, that is called investment, meant to be for profit. But the shallow blanket condemnation of the Church building hospitals and schools for profit, show the utter ignorance of these haters and bashers of the issue of MISSION which is not equivalent to the token CSR (corporate social responsibility) of most for profit companies. When we religious and diocesan clergy build hospitals and schools, they are not primarily for profit, but to create legitimate sustainable works to be able to help those who otherwise cannot afford to pay for them. These propagandists and ignoramuses who love to perorate against the Catholic Church but gloss over other religious groups show nothing but their bias or hatred against the biggest charitable institution in the world.
It only means one thing … Their aim is really not to find out the truth and expose it, but to expose their own preconceived truth and their own brand of truth to mislead, and to sow doubt and confusion in the unsuspecting minds of people who take everything such fake journalists say, hook, line and sinker.
I notice one thing though … Those who comment in favor of what the fake journalist online journal called R are regularly reporting (almost on schedule, and timed for maximum readership on certain occasions), are most likely the same people, using the same stale arguments, designed not to ferret out truth or contribute to the search for truth, but to foster anger and defiance against the hand that probably fed them. (Yes, many were and are recipients of the largesse of the Church, but either without them knowing or they simply deny them). The negative comments are done by people, who, in the first place, already have an axe to grind against the Church for reasons best known to themselves. And they simply love to come out of the woodworks on occasions like now, when the Church occupies center stage in the hearts and minds of people, with the impending visit of the Pope.
N.B. Incidentally, I write from a school that has no assets to speak of, liquid or non-liquid. These ignoramuses always say we charge high tuition fees, but they never bother to ask how much of that goes to personnel and operations. To survive, I had, and still have to beg the help of Catholic friends who have the wherewithal and the know-how to help us keep afloat. And yes, we priests and brothers who run the school do not live off the non-existent fat of the land, but by the sweat of our brow, very literally, yes … including washing our own clothes and cooking our own meals on occasion, for one simple reason … we cannot afford personnel especially on holidays that are getting more and more by the year. I have no reason to complain, but I do have reason to rant against fake journalists like those of R who seem to be overfocused on their imaginative “riches” of the Catholic Church. Now, if they do real research, not based on hunches, they might want to tell us where those riches are, apart from the usual, stale, and old arguments like the paintings of Michelangelo and the few buildings in the tiny state called the Vatican.
This is meant, not as a rebuttal against people who already made up their mind, but for friends who, on account of such lies and misleading articles, are getting confused.