Peter's Pence

The collection is for the Pope’s charity. What it mainly pays for is an apparatus. And one of the richest dioceses in the world is not in Rome but in Westphalia.

I. The collection

Once a year, around the feast of Saints Peter and Paul at the end of June, the collection bag for the Pope goes round in the Catholic parishes of the world. Peter’s Pence is old. In eighth-century Anglo-Saxon England every household paid a penny to Rome, until Henry VIII abolished the levy in 1534 when he broke with the Pope. Peter’s Pence was revived when the Pope lost his Papal States around 1860, and with them his tax revenues. In 1871 Pius IX recognised it as a permanent institution.

Today it is advertised as “the Pope’s charity”. The annual report for 2025 shows 57.6 million euros in income. Almost two thirds come from the dioceses; the largest donor is the United States with 26 per cent, Germany is fifth. 54.5 million were paid out. Of this, 13.3 million went to aid projects for people in need, 252 projects in 74 countries. The remaining 41.2 million went to “the activity of the Holy See in the service of the Pope’s apostolic mission”. That is the Curia in Rome, its offices, its salaries, its embassies.

Whoever puts a ten-euro note into the bag on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul thus gives two and a half euros to the poor and seven and a half to the administration. This is not forbidden, and it is in the report. It is not on the poster.

II. An apparatus in the red

The Holy See spends around 1.2 billion euros a year. About sixty per cent of this goes on salaries, pensions and running the Curia, a large part on diplomacy with embassies in more than 180 countries. Income is not enough. For years the deficit has been between 50 and 90 million euros; in 2023 it was 83.5 million. Depending on the estimate, the pension fund for some 5,000 employees and retirees is short of between 350 million and one billion.

Yet the Vatican is not poor. Its asset administration, APSA, owns 4,281 properties in Italy and around 1,200 abroad, in London, Paris, Geneva and Lausanne. Its equity stood at almost 2.7 billion euros at the end of 2025, and 29 per cent of its portfolio is in physical gold. The Vatican bank, the IOR, manages 5.7 billion euros for some 12,000 clients “belonging to or serving the Church”, and paid the Pope a record dividend of 24 million for 2025. The Vatican Museums bring in almost 100 million a year from seven million visitors.

So the wealth does yield returns, but not enough for the apparatus it is meant to carry. Nor has it always been managed wisely. From 2014 the Secretariat of State put around 200 million into a luxury building on London’s Sloane Avenue and sold it in 2022 at a loss of more than 100 million. Cardinal Angelo Becciu was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for this in December 2023. In March 2026 the Vatican court of appeal ordered the trial to be repeated, partly because Pope Francis had given the prosecutor special powers in 2019 by an unpublished decree. Whether money from Peter’s Pence was also lost remains unclear to this day. The Vatican denies it. Its own prefect for the economy admitted in 2021 that the donations had traditionally been invested together with other funds of the Secretariat of State.

III. Where the wealth comes from

The foundation of today’s wealth was laid by Mussolini. In the Lateran Treaty of 1929 Italy compensated the Pope for the lost Papal States with 750 million lire in cash and one billion lire in government bonds. Pius XI entrusted the money to the banker Bernardino Nogara, who managed it until 1954 and answered only to the Pope.

Nogara invested the money like a modern fund manager. He bought gold, property and companies, sat on the boards of the insurer Generali and of Italy’s largest construction company, and acquired a majority stake in Serono, then Italy’s largest manufacturer of contraceptives. The Church profited from selling what it forbade its faithful. For the profits Nogara founded a holding company in Luxembourg, Grolux, chosen for its weak disclosure rules, and built up a Swiss company, Profima, into a holding company for shareholdings.

For many years Nogara also sat on the board of the chemical group Montecatini, in which, according to a report in Der Spiegel in 1970, the Vatican held “very substantial shares”. After his death other confidants of the Vatican sat on the board and in 1966 took part in deciding the merger with Edison to form Montecatini Edison, later Montedison. The same report mentions holdings in munitions factories. What that meant for a Catholic who learned of it we have told in “Why I Did Not Become a Leftist”.

How large the shareholdings were became clear in a dispute with the Italian state. In 1965 Time magazine estimated the Vatican’s share at about 15 per cent of the value of all shares listed on the Italian stock exchange. When Italy taxed dividends in 1962, the Vatican refused to pay and invoked the Lateran Treaty. Prime Minister Aldo Moro offered an exemption if the Vatican submitted a list of its holdings. Cardinal Secretary of State Cicognani refused: a sovereign state does not disclose its finances to another. The Vatican threatened to dump its Italian shares on the market.

Paul VI finally decided to sell off the large blocks. In 1969, after talks in the Apostolic Palace, Michele Sindona took over the stake in Società Generale Immobiliare and became an adviser to the Vatican bank. Sindona was later convicted in the United States over the collapse of the Franklin National Bank, and in Italy in 1986 for instigating the murder of the lawyer Giorgio Ambrosoli; two days after the verdict he died from poisoned coffee. After the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, the Vatican bank paid the creditors around 250 million dollars in 1984 as a “voluntary contribution”. And in the early 1990s part of the bribes from the Enimont deal, in which Montedison was involved, passed through accounts at the Vatican bank. The Milan prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro called it “the mother of all bribes”. The same seclusion with which the Vatican refused to hand over its list of shares in 1964 made its bank a transit station for other people’s money.

That the pattern was not confined to Rome is shown by Medellín in the 1980s. In September 1984 the magazine Semana reported on the “narcolimosnas”, the alms of the drug traffickers. Two priests in the city, Elías Lopera and Hernán Cuartas, were regarded as advisers to Pablo Escobar and supported his campaign “Medellín sin tugurios”; Archbishop Alfonso López Trujillo is said to have tolerated them. As early as September 1983 the journalist María Jimena Duzán had hinted that contributions surrounding his elevation to cardinal in February of that year were of dubious origin. This was never proven. The Bishop of Pereira, Darío Castrillón, on the other hand, openly admitted that he had accepted money from the mafia and distributed it to the poor; he was a pastor, he said, not a public prosecutor. Both made careers in Rome. Until his death in 2008 López Trujillo headed the Pontifical Council for the Family; Castrillón became a cardinal and Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy.

Nogara’s holding companies still exist. APSA’s annual report for 2025 lists income from Grolux in Britain, Profima in Switzerland and Sopridex in France. It does not publish a list of the companies in which the Vatican holds shares, today as little as in 1964.

IV. Who owns what in the Church

The Catholic Church is not a corporation with a single balance sheet. Under canon law all property belongs to the entity that acquired it: the parish, the diocese, the order, the foundation. The Pope is the “supreme administrator” of all ecclesiastical goods, but not their owner.

A comparison shows what the relationship actually looks like. In 2023 the Archdiocese of Paderborn reported total assets of 4.9 billion euros, 4.5 billion of them in financial investments. Cologne came to 4.3 billion, Munich-Freising to 3.9 billion. A single Westphalian diocese has more on its books than the Vatican’s entire asset administration. The wealth of Germany’s two large churches is estimated at 400 to 450 billion euros; most buildings and land are carried only at historical values. Caritas employs almost 740,000 people in more than 25,000 facilities. Their work, however, is paid for mainly by health and care insurance funds and from public money, not from church tax.

That such wealth accumulates is also due to the way it is taxed. In Germany dioceses and parishes are corporations under public law. They pay corporation tax only on their “commercial enterprises”; interest, dividends and rents from the management of their assets remain tax-free. Religious orders are mostly organised as charitable associations or likewise as public-law corporations and enjoy tax privileges. They become liable to tax only when they act like a business and take in more than 45,000 euros a year. The monastery brewery of Andechs therefore pays taxes like any other brewery, while the monastery as such does not. Churches, parish halls and clergy residences are exempt from property tax, and inheritances and gifts to the Church from inheritance tax. Church institutions have to pay value added tax only after a transition period ending in 2026, and even then only where they compete with private providers.

On top of this, the state pays. The tax offices collect church tax for a fee of two to four per cent. Because it can be deducted from income tax, the state loses, according to estimates, billions in tax every year. And the federal states transfer so-called state payments to the two large churches, around 657 million euros in 2025, as compensation for the expropriations of 1803. The Weimar Constitution required in 1919 that these payments be redeemed, and the Basic Law adopted the mandate. No government has fulfilled it to this day. Germany’s richest diocese invests billions without paying tax on the returns, and receives money every year for a loss that lies more than two hundred years in the past. This is no breach of the law by the Church. It is an omission by the state that suits both sides.

The periphery is rich, the centre is in the red. Money flows from the edge to the middle: through Peter’s Pence, through the dioceses’ compulsory contributions, which come mainly from Germany and the United States, and through the deposits of orders and dioceses at the Vatican bank. Little flows back.

V. Rome owns little and controls much

The power of the centre rests not on money but on law and faith. Whoever wants to sell or encumber church property in a German diocese needs the permission of the Holy See above a certain limit. Since 1 January 2026, depending on the size of the diocese, that limit has been between 10 and 25 million euros. Rome does not need to own the billions in Paderborn in order to have a say in the major transactions. It appoints the bishops who manage them.

This is the same model we described in “The Founders of the Christian Leviathan”: the sword in one hand, the crosier in the other, and the purse stays with others. A company organised this way would be called a franchise system. Head office manages the brand and the rules; the branches carry the business and pay for it.

Opacity is part of this. Neither the Vatican bank nor the asset administration names its holdings. The orders publish almost nothing. A consolidated balance sheet of the universal Church does not exist, and it is not wanted. Every reform of recent decades has only shifted things around. Francis concentrated all funds at the Vatican bank in 2022; Leo XIV revoked this arrangement in October 2025. As early as June 2025, a few weeks after his election, the Vatican had launched a fundraising campaign against the deficit.

Where nothing is disclosed, legends grow. One of the most persistent holds that the Jesuits own half of Bank of America. The bank’s largest shareholders are in fact the fund companies Vanguard and BlackRock and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, with stakes of seven to nine per cent. The legend comes from the same tradition as the forged “Monita secreta” of 1614, according to which the Jesuits secretly rule the world. The Church’s opacity does not make such inventions true, but it makes them hard to refute.

So the circle closes. The collection advertised as charity plugs the gap of an apparatus that commands billions in property and gold and still cannot live within its means. The poor get a quarter. What the Church in Rome really costs is not seen in the collection bag, but in the balance sheets of the dioceses that fill it.

Further reading: The Founders of the Christian Leviathan · Revealed Truths or Questionable Constructs? · Watt soll dä janze Käu? · Why I Did Not Become a Leftist · The Other Side of the Coin