Posted on 02/09/2017 12:29:02 PM PST by heterosupremacist
The Catholic Church is the largest charitable organization in the world, and since the Vatican doesn’t mint their own currency the money has to come from somewhere.
I typically go to Mass two or three times a week so it’s fair to say I probably hear, at the very minimum, around 104 homilies a year. Of those 104 homilies, only two Sundays are devoted to our Annual Diocesan Support Appeal. For all the good the Church does throughout the entire year, asking for some extra help once or even twice a year seems like extra help once or even twice a year seems like an extremely small inconvenience to bear.
(Excerpt) Read more at aleteia.org ...
As Joanne McPortland reported in Aleteia, “The average share of income that U.S. Catholics give to the Church is a mere 1%. That’s the lowest percentage of giving of any major religious denomination in the United States. Fewer than 1 in 3 Americans who identify themselves as Catholic attend Mass on a ‘regular’ basis (defined as at least once a month), and of those regular attendees, only 30% give to the support of their parish.”
I do not give to the Catholic Charities. They are charitable to everyone else except Catholics. I give a significant amount of my income to the local parish. IO also have four children in Catholic School.
Had it be shot down I hope they wouldn’t have woken up Trump...
Technically true, no doubt, that the church only dedicates two weeks to this particular event. However it's certainly not the only time the church asks for money during the mass.
As the bookkeeper and a former Methodist I’ve been pretty appalled at how little Catholics give to the church and how much they expect.
The bulk of the money is given by about 10% of the parishioners. It doesn’t matter if the pews are completely full or sparse the collection remains nearly the same.
All parishes pay 10% of all income except fund raising costs and money set aside for the poor to the diocese and then the diocese pays a tax...on up to the Vatican, I presume.
Then comes the appeal. We have to raise an additional 10% or it comes out of our income. The one nice thing about the diocesan appeal is what you raise above and beyond the assessment returns to our parish tax-free. We also have a New Year’s fund raiser that pays our assessment and then some so everything that is pledged comes back.
I give nothing to second collections that go out of the parish, time and time again you find out that portions of it were spent for things totally against our faith.
This is the key to the whole issue. If all U.S. Catholics were to tithe -- and I will make the assumption they would only give 5% to the parish/diocese and the other 5% to other charitable/religious causes -- there would never be a need for diocesan appeals (and employees could be paid a more appropriate wage).
I once read a comment that Catholics have “deep pockets, but short arms”. Too many ‘ethnic’ Catholics parishes like Italians, Irish, Polish, French, tend to still think of themselves as ‘poor immigrant parishes’ even though we are two generations or more since those immigrants arrived from the old world, and built those beautiful churches in large urban areas. And the grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of those immigrants are doing much better, financially than their antecedents, so they are in just the right position to support their parishes, they have just never gotten into the habit of doing so.
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