Most people believe the real power in Catholicism resides with the hierarchy, and in terms of both theology and church law, that's basically right. For instance, canon law says the pope wields "supreme, full, immediate and universal" authority, and it's tough to get more sweeping than that.
One wonders, however, if an accountant would reach the same conclusion.
When it comes to the financial dimension of Catholic life, there are certainly some deep pockets out there. Just to offer a few examples:
- The University of Notre Dame, America's flagship Catholic university, has an annual budget of $1.2 billion and an endowment estimated at $7.5 billion.
- The Archdiocese of Chicago last year reported cash, investments and buildings valued at $2.472 billion.
- The Knights of Columbus has more than $85 billion of life insurance in force, with $8 billion in annual sales.
- In Rome, the Institute for the Works of Religion, known popularly (if, some say, inaccurately) as the "Vatican Bank," administers assets in excess of $6 billion.
- American Catholics drop more than $8 billion every year into the Sunday collection plate, which works out to more than $150 million a week.
- In Germany, the Catholic church netted $8.8 billion in 2010 from the national "church tax," allowing it to remain the country's largest private employer after Volkswagen.
First, the vast majority of money washing through the church remains on the local level, especially the parish.
In the United States, more than 90 percent of revenues collected by parishes remains there.
Those funds are not centrally collected, and they're not really even centrally tracked, either by the bishops' conference or by Rome.
Nobody in the Vatican could tell you how much a parish in Dubuque, Iowa, spent this month on coffee and donuts after Mass.
Second, much of the real money bypasses the hierarchy.
To take the most obvious example, Catholic hospitals generate billions in revenue, well above what parishes will ever see from their collection plates. Hospitals may be sponsored by a religious order or other canonical entity, but they're usually governed by a lay board of directors and incorporated under civil, not ecclesiastical, law. The same point holds for most Catholic colleges and universities.
If you're looking for the real moguls and tycoons in the church, in other words, they're not to be found among the bishops.
Let's crunch some numbers to flesh out these observations.
Based on data from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, average annual parish revenue in the United States is $695,291. Joseph Harris, one of the premier financial analysts in American Catholicism, has done the math. Multiplying that estimate by the 17,139 parishes in the country yields total parish income of $11.9 billion, with two-thirds ($8.2 billion) coming from the collection plate. The rest comes from capital campaigns, one-time gifts, inheritances and other relatively minor sources.
Since average parish expenses are $626,000, most places are basically breaking even. (The national total for parish expenses works out to $10.7 billion.) Salaries are typically the largest line item, representing more than 40 percent of parish budgets.
Other major outlays include the physical plant,; parish operations, such as a soup kitchen or catechism program; and in some cases, subsidies to a Catholic grade school. Parishes are also expected to provide money to the diocese, a contribution known as the cathedraticum.
At the diocesan level, 15 percent of America's 196 dioceses have budgets of more than $20 million, while 15 percent have budgets between $10 million and $20 million, 35 percent are under $5 million, and 40 percent fall between $5 million and $10 million.
In 2010, the Archdiocese of Chicago had a budget of $120 million; the Diocese of Juneau, Alaska, the smallest in terms of population, had a budget of $1.5 million. All told, a rough estimate for combined diocesan expenditures in America every year would be $2 billion.
Of course, bishops don't directly control parish assets.
Taken together, however, the amounts for parishes and dioceses provide a sense of officialdom's financial footprint.
Now, some terms of comparison.
The 10 largest Catholic universities in the United States, as measured by enrollment, are DePaul, St. John's, Loyola, Saint Louis, Georgetown, Boston College, Fordham, Villanova, Notre Dame and Marquette. In 2011, their annual operating budgets, taken together, totaled $6.27 billion.
All by themselves, these 10 schools spent roughly the same amount as more than 17,000 parishes, and three times as much as all the country's dioceses.
According to the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, there are 251 degree-granting Catholic institutions of higher education in the United States. Most are fairly small financial potatoes, but their total assets still easily dwarf the official institutional structures.
Turning to hospitals, just one Catholic system -- Ascension Health, the country's largest, with 1,400 locations in 21 states and the District of Columbia -- had revenues of $15 billion in 2011, exceeding the combined haul for all parishes.
There are 56 Catholic health care systems in America, and in 2010, the Catholic Health Association reported they had total expenses of $98.6 billion. That's almost 10 times the amount spent by parishes, and a fraction under 50 times the amount spent by dioceses.
Catholic Charities USA, one of the largest private charitable networks in the United States, had revenues in 2010 of $4.67 billion, of which $2.9 billion came from the government and most of the rest from private donations.
This one charity, in other words, collected more in public funds alone than all the country's dioceses spent.
What insights flow from these numbers? At least four come to mind.
First, they provide a glimpse of how the world looks through the eyes of a bishop. When tensions flare with a university or hospital, there's often a tendency to frame things as "powerful bishop versus defenseless institution." The way the typical bishop might experience it, however, is more like "cash-poor bishop versus deep-pockets institution."
Second, running these numbers corrects an overly "purple" ecclesiology, in which "the church" is defined almost exclusively in terms of the hierarchy. At least as far as dollars and cents are concerned, that's obviously off the mark.
Third, the numbers suggest a possible financial dimension to some of today's debates over Catholic identity. Understandably, some bishops may fret that if schools, hospitals, charities or religious orders drift out of the official orbit, it's not just the church's missionary capacity that's at stake, but an enormous chunk of its financial footprint too.
A fourth reflection comes from Harris.
"Money is a mystery in the church," he told me. "We don't know what we have or what we spend it on, so we lurch from crisis to crisis."
Based on the kinds of numbers provided in this column, Harris estimates that total annual revenue for the Catholic church in America works out to around $153 billion, but he's the first to admit that's really just a guess.
Harris believes the resources exist to pull together accurate financial data if the church gets its act together: "This is not an impoverished organization," he says.
Pardon the pun, but Harris is probably right on the money.