I was just thinking about your comment about how the poor need us to sell off the churches and take care of their needs.
I can see where you're coming from, but I don't think it quite meets the reality, which is more complex. Back where I came from, an old Snow-Belt Rust-Belt Catholic Industrial city (Erie, PA), the big, beautiful churches were built by the poor, 100 - 140 years ago, and they were their pride and joy.
I'm not taling about the welfare-EBT card poor: those things didn't exist. I'm talking abnout the immigrant-poor, the Irish, Slavs, and Italians, who moved to Erie to work in the industries: Hammermill Paper, National Forge and Steel, General Elecric, National Sterilizer. They shook $5 bills and $10 bills out of their thin, thin wallets to build those churches.
Italian stonecutters made the altars. German woord-carvers made the altar rails. Construction trades people worked all day at their jobs, but worked evenings and weekends on the church. Catholic cops and waitresses, nurses and laundry workers (like my father) were glad to blow a week's wages at the annual Church Festival to pay down the building debts.
Back in the day, this expressed people's sense of propriety, their idea of the "fittingness of things,": they provided the ebst they had, to build the most beautiful churches for the love of God.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that people of modest means, necessarily would rather have free sandwiches for their picnics, than stained glass windows for Christ Our Lord.
Auction off old, consecrated church buildings --- to whom, a Saudi prince? --- so you can give the money to the panhandlers in the city park, and the Saudis can install minarets on a gutted, whitewashed, deconsecrated Church of the Blessed Sacrament??
The architecture and art treasures are, in a sense, a public trust maintained by the Church for our common use and enjoyment (that is, not set up for public tours for a cash admission charge!) --- and not readily convertible to liquid assets. If all that were converted to cash, and given away, it would be gross cultural vandalism, unethical alienation of property, and a violation of fiduciary trust --- or I should say, rather, the unethical violation of the sweat and labor, and hope and intentions of the people who raised those churches, and their children and grandchildres, for whom --- in God's name -- they raised them.
The Catholic Church is selling of dozens of churches annually in the East and Northeast. Instead of evangelizing the neighborhoods on which those churches sit. It's a crime and a sin.
Well said!