EVERYONE has plans to rescue the Church of England, and here’s mine: on ordination, all preachers should be presented with a five-minute hour glass to remind them, as their hearers may be reminded, of their own mortality. But it would not be purely symbolic; for, each time the hour glass was turned, the preacher would have to eat at the end of the service another egg boiled for the length of their sermon.
So, a five-minute sermon would produce a delightful egg, neither too hard nor too soft; a ten-minute sermon would compel the preacher to eat two hard boiled eggs; 15 minutes and they would need to eat three, boiled till they resembled greying bullets. I do not expect that under this regime there would be any 20-minute sermons preached.
One great advantage of this scheme is that it would be cheap. Congregations may be reluctant to fund diocesan bureaucracies, but half a dozen eggs a month would not be an unpopular tax. I know that the Church Commissioners control more money than the Vatican, but every little helps.
That rather astonishing comparison falls out of an excellent piece in the Financial Times on the Vatican’s looming financial crisis. The Vatican bank manages only €5.4 billion in assets, which of course belong to independent Catholic bodies, while the Vatican’s own sovereign wealth fund, which would correspond more closely to the Commissioners, has close to only €3 billion under management. Even added together, this is less than the Commissioners’ £10.4 billion — mere chickenfeed, in fact. There is deficit of billions in the Vatican’s pension fund as well. On the other hand, these are Italian figures, and the real money is off the books.
The 2020 official report on the sins and crimes of the late Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a kingmaker in the RC Church in the US until his fall (News, Comment, 20 November 2020), contained one jaw-dropping paragraph: “In addition to fundraising and administrative skills, McCarrick learned from Cardinal Cooke the importance of gift-giving to others within the Church. It has long been customary for many American bishops, who often have greater access to resources than prelates from other nations, to provide funds to the Holy See for special projects and to make gifts to Holy See officials in recognition of services provided throughout the year.”
William Cash the younger, a former editor of the Catholic Herald, had a piece in The Sunday Times about the American right-wing RC millionaires who were in Rome last week to spray their money around: “Every year, after Easter, American VIPs from the Papal Foundation and other groups make a ‘Rome pilgrimage’ to deliver their annual financial pledge to the Vatican. The foundation joining fee, to become a ‘Steward of St Peter’, is $1 million. Last year they gave away $14.7 million in grants, scholarships, and humanitarian aid. . .
“The foundation has plans to increase grants to $30 million annually and to raise up to another $750 million from American philanthropists in the future. ‘This room could raise a billion to help the church,’ one VIP guest told me. ‘So long as we have the right pope.’”
Further down, unblushingly, Cash writes: “Nobody in Rome suggests that wealthy American Catholic leaders are trying to buy a seat at the conclave.” Perish the thort, as Molesworth would say.
We can hope that President Trump’s antics on social media, where he posted a video of himself photoshopped into papal regalia, will have the same effect on the conclave as he has had in every other foreign electorate this year. If only he would endorse a candidate for Canterbury, how much simpler life would be.
OF COURSE, all this Schadenfreude at the Vatican finances should not blind us to the fact that the Church of England is worse than broke at the diocesan level.
I was talking at the weekend to a shrewd observer of the Church of England, who told me that an assistant bishop had been greatly cheered to see 120 more people in his cathedral at Easter. My friend, though, was horrified that the Bishop could not see that this was a sign of the collapse of the parish system. When people in rural areas decide that they must get in the car and drive to the city for their annual Christian observance, this can be only because they feel that their parish church has disappeared, and the vicar with it. How many will not have bothered at all?
