[alistairSH]

The Vatican owns ~15% of the value listed on Italian stock exchanges and somewhere north of $10 billion (US) in total wealth. That's just the vatican - the largest regional subsidiaries are worth more (Catholic Church Germany is about $25 billion).

LDS has somewhere around $65 billion in wealth.

International religious organizations are absolutely businesses. Profit may not be their primary purpose, but they have their fingers in all sorts of business-like enterprises - real estate, stocks, etc.

[pigscantfly]

Do you have any sources for these numbers? They seem low given the value of works of art and real estate held by the church; I'm just curious what the $10B USD figure includes.

[ebiester]

That seems low given the amount of property they control and their international foothold, along with the amount of time they have had to acquire their wealth.

[alistairSH]

Shame on me... I didn't check the date on the source - the Vatican number was taken from a Time Magazine article from 1965. I came up near the top of the Google results and it never crossed my mind that Time published articles that far back.

[cicero]

Regardless of the size of the assets of these organizations, the parent's point is still valid that their success should not be measured in $s. So the Vatican has $10B in wealth, does that mean that they are successfully leading people to heaven? I say these numbers have little to do with what the Vatican exists for. If anyone in the Vatican thinks otherwise, I would say their priorities are off. (I speak about the Vatican rather than the LDS church because I know more about it, being Catholic myself.)