It feels perverse to speak of a churches success as a business rather than success through the spiritual satisfaction of its members. It belittles the "good word" and treats it as corporate decor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
