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Loading ...Comedian: End world hunger? Sell the Vatican
10.15.2009 1:00pm EDT
(Rome) Comedian Sarah Silverman has a new proposal for ending world hunger: Sell the Vatican.
In a new profanity-laced monologue making the rounds on YouTube in time for U.N. World Food Day on Friday, Silverman suggests that it’s time for the pope to “move out of your house that is a city” and use the proceeds to feed the world’s poor.
“On an ego level alone you will be the biggest hero in the history of ever!” she exclaimed. “Sell the Vatican. Feed the world.”The Vatican clearly has no plans to follow suit. On Thursday, a spokesman declined to comment. But the Catholic League, the U.S. Catholic civil rights organization, denounced Silverman and cable broadcaster HBO for her “obscene” and “filthy diatribe.”
In a statement, it noted that such an attack would never have been leveled against, say, the chief rabbi of Jerusalem or the state of Israel and added that the “Catholic Church operates more hospitals and feeds more of the poor than any private institution in the world.”
Yet the Rev. James Martin, culture editor of the Jesuit magazine America, says Silverman may be onto something. In an online article, Martin noted that Jesus himself told his followers to sell what they had and give it to the poor.
“Of course Pope Benedict XVI could not ’sell’ any of the treasures of the Vatican, the same way that your local archbishop couldn’t sell off the cathedral at a whim; they are not his, they are the church’s,” Martin wrote. “And the church is not simply the hierarchy but the entire people of God.”
But he added: “Still, perhaps Ms. Silverman, in her postmodern, potty-mouthed way is on to something. Like Jesus was. Sell the Vatican? Well, maybe not everything but perhaps a statue or two?”
For the record, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, which just released its annual report on the state of world hunger, says global food output will have to increase by 70 percent to feed a projected population of 9.1 billion in 2050.
To achieve that, poor countries will need $44 billion in annual agricultural aid, compared with the current $7.9 billion, the Rome-based FAO said. Overall, an annual net investment in agriculture of $83 billion is needed to feed the world.
Even if the pope were to sell the Vatican, it wouldn’t be enough.
In 2004, the Vatican disclosed that the Holy See’s real estate was worth 700 million euros, or about $908 million at the time. That doesn’t include St. Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel, which the Vatican termed priceless and valued at a symbolic 1 euro.
While the Vatican’s artistic holdings are obviously worth millions, the institution itself doesn’t bring in a lot of cash. In 2008, it ran a euro0.9 million ($1.28 million) deficit, the second year of losses. Revenues were euro253.9 million and expenses euro254.8 million.
The Vatican began publishing its finances in 1981, when Pope John Paul II ordered financial disclosure to debunk the idea that the Vatican was rich.
Silverman, who is no stranger to religiously and racially charged slurs, gained international attention with her 2008 “The Great Schlep” campaign in which she exhorted Jews to go to Florida to convince their grandparents to vote for Barack Obama.
There was an old movies form the early 1960’s called “the Shoes of the Fisherman”, with Martin Sheen. It followed along the same lines.
“[The]Catholic Church operates more hospitals and feeds more of the poor than any private institution in the world.”
This might be true. For the hospital it’s at most true in a certain sense though.
If I weren’t so tired I’d check out the exact figures (but if you don’t believe me you should check them out for yourself anyway) but for the US, where Catholic hospitals have a large presence, the figure is somewhere around 20%. This might be more hospitals than any other single institution has, but the funding for the hospitals is another matter. It’s not the RCC that funds them.
Most of their money comes from taxes (primarily medicaid and medicare) while another large portion comes from private donations that are not necessarily “religious”. Only a very small part of the money comes directly from the church.
Their continued “We operate most hospitals in the world!!!” really reeks of dishonesty. And it doesn’t even apply to the discussion at hand!
Even if the church did do more than others to help the less fortunate, that doesn’t change any of the facts here.
The Pope talks a lot about being humble and not being greedy. In fact, he recently had some speech where he accused atheists (among other people) for ruining the world by being too materialistic and having too much stuff. He said that real, good, honest people aren’t like that.
… and all this while he sits in one of the most expensively decorated palaces in the world.
Even if the church at large is good at helping people (a statement I take serious issue with for several reasons) it doesn’t change the fact that the pope has an extreme amount of material wealth around him, and the power to redistribute at least some of that wealth in the spirit of Jesus (the real, socialist Jesus of the gospels, not the modern conservative American Jesus that is).
Talking about hospitals is nothing but misdirection.
Anything that pisses off the catholic league is a good thing.
I don’t normally like Sarah Silverman, but I must say, I saw the skit on Bill Maher and it made me laugh.
Side note: Please help me grow my forum – Our President | Our Voices. Just click on my username, thanks!
seagle1963: very close! It was the lat 1960s (witness the go-go outfits etc.) and starred Anthony Quinn as the 1st Russian Pope, facing a world at the brink of disaster. It follows the exact same story line (sell the vatican to prevent hunger in China to save the world from war.
Obviously nobody on either side of today’s “scandal” recognized that the idea is not an original thought, and the movie (though a bit long) was quite good.
I drag it out about once a year because it’s a great movie, and the plot line (making the ultimate sacrifice for the benefit of others) is well made, both through the personal life of the Pope character, and what was going on in the world.
And believe it or not, this “filthy diatribe” of a past generation had a positive ending! Perhaps the “Princes of the Church” should watch and take notes.
But since nobody in the previous Bush admin saw fit to watch “The West Wing” with steno book in hand….
This was actually close to the plan that Pope John Paul, 1 had planned before he was assassinated in the Vatican only two weeks after his announcement.
While it’s fun to be against things, and even more fun to piss off the pope, this proposal makes no sense at all to me.
To whom would you sell such things? More to the point, if someone has enough money to buy the Pieta, for instance, why don’t they just give that money to the poor and cut out the middle man?
If you’re really interested in doing something for your fellow man, don’t wait for someone else to initiate the effort.
I love Sarah and congratulate her on the best idea to appear since DaVinci. It should be done as an auction, of course. Invite all of the sheikhs whose shariah forbids homosexuality so that they can bid on all the kiddie porn that has accumulated over the years.
Perhaps Putin could convert the Pristine Chapel into a modern exercise spa: he can work a rowing machine while looking up at all those cherubs, buffed and toned Adam, and the bear in the beard.
The offices can be converted into a new banking center, which the clerics wanted it to be in the first place and, had their mafia links not been exposed and created the scandal depicted in the last Godfather movie, it might have worked out that way.
Just give me all the art treasures and banned books they’ve been hoarding for two centuries, including the final confessions of Paul the Tarsun, revealing once and for all what a misogynist and self-loathing, internalized homophobe he was.
At least they didn’t refer to her as that Christ-killing Levite wench. Sign of progress. And at least she made no reference to her “queefing” episode, which had me running for clean (dry) underwear.
Let’s just say, for giggles, that I had some vast fortune, and that my vast fortune brought me ownership of all the land and all the material resources of the Catholic Church. Let’s limit that a little and say it was only the property and assets in the US, or attached to the US. The IRS would requre a dollar amount. In Manhattan alone, who would like to check property records, find out how much land is occupied by St Vincent’s Hospital and St Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown, and calculate the comparable values of just the land and not the buildings? I’d get a massive tax credit. I’m sure the Vatican isn’t thrilled at the idea of anybody starting to eye its property (land, buildings, artwork, libraries, universities, hospitals, etc) and start calculating how much cash it’d take to replicate what they have.
Besides, you’d think that a German pope would know better than to even let one of his minions suggest that the Church of Rome has never placed a monetary value on piety. How else did they manage to sell all those indulgences that made that damn fool Martin Luther start asking questions he didn’t need to ask?
Great idea, I’ve been saying this for years. For the vatican to try to say it is not wealthy is a joke. They do a good job putting assetts outside the official country of the Vatican, but if you ever really added it up it would be hundreds of billions.
And lets not be fooled by their “charity”. They are bigots…they don’t do charity to help people, they do it as recruitment. If catholics were truly charitable, they would do it of themselves and not need the church to brow beat them (and push them to give money to fight civil rights as they just did in Maine).
The Vatican owns treasures beyond our imagination. There are the priceless artworks (and yes many are porn….one of my favorites is the Laocoon group (I always forget how to spell that) that was dug up in Rome and confiscated by the pope (I believe early 16th century?). This work of art should be in a secular, public museum, but you have to go to a secluded little out of the way courtyard deep in the vatican to find it. If you have not seen it in person you are missing one of the world’s greatest works of male muscular beauty. It is so erotic, so beautiful and so amazingly fluid you could forget it is carved of stone. It is full of erotic imagery and obviously was carved to celebrate the beauty and eroticism of the male body.
I could go on.
Just stroll the aisles of the vatican museum and there are thousands upon thousands of artifacts that most tourists walk right by. I remember a case of 16 and 15th century personal effects of various popes, each object in a Paris antique shop even without a papal association would have been worth thousands.
They could dismantle rooms and sell parts for millions. 16th century door handles and knockers, which they probably have thousands of, are each worth a few thousand on the open market. They have thousands upon thousands of carvings from the 15, 16 and 17th centuries of minor historical value that I would just cherish on my walls.
What they hold is of incredible, incredible value. If they were to put just a fraction of the less historically important artifacts up for sale I’d be on the first plane to London to bid on them.
I probably wouldn’t get a single piece because the prices would be way beyond my modest means. It would be a feeding frenzy! And to get all the minor pieces out in the open, available for scientific study, just think of how many more Da Vinci’s would be documented, like the one found in New York recently.
(imagine being the poor guy who sold that for 19k not knowing he had a multi hundred million dollar artwork?)
Brilliant! This is simultaneously absurd and logically true at the same time.
She rocks….
>Martin wrote. “And the church is not simply the hierarchy but the entire people of God.”
I almost fell off my chair laughing at this one. Oh, so NOW they’re laying down the heavy hierarchical thing–”You can only know god through us”–and shouting Power to the People?!!
Oh, that’s RICH!
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seagle1963 Said: October 15th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
There was an old movies form the early 1960’s called “the Shoes of the Fisherman”, with Martin Sheen. It followed along the same lines.*****
Since Martin Sheen would have been only in his early to mid-twenties, he probably would not have been cast in the role of a “pope of the Catholic Church”. As a popular line of the time stated “Would you believe, Anthony Quinn as the Pope in “The Shoes of the Fisherman?”