Church-Owned Business: Stretching Religion

Despite the Vatican’s world-wide benevolence, Roman Catholic journalist Nino Lo Bello thinks the sign of the cross is often sublimated to the sign of the dollar. Lo Bello, who writes for the Paris Herald Tribune, has put together most of the pieces of the Vatican financial puzzle in his book The Vatican Empire. He admits using devious means to crack the high secrecy surrounding the topic.

Of late, Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been sounding the same theme even louder, but largely to deaf ears. Americans United, often accused of seeing a Catholic plot behind every closed door, finds something more than altruism behind the Vatican’s current aid to besieged Biafrans in the Nigerian civil war. The group claims it’s partly a Vatican struggle to establish itself in this African territory.

This is similar to Lo Bello’s claim that one can discern, even from afar, Vatican eagerness to pull the checkstring on Communism by bringing Catholicism to other continents.

The church itself is practicing free enterprise in such places as the plot of land next to the now-rising Kennedy arts center along the Potomac River in Washington, D. C. Rome expects to profit handsomely from its investment in the chic Watergate apartments, which sell for as high as $165,000 each and last month added Attorney General John Mitchell to the prestigious list of residents.

The book claims Vatican millions are multiplied almost interminably throughout the United States, though the financial gnomes of Geneva say known Vatican investments made there in American interests do not run high. But of course not all roads from Rome to Wall Street lead through Geneva.

There is strong interplay. Half interest in two Vatican-controlled steel mills in Italy is held by U. S. Steel. Armco has a half interest in another. Ratheon and Vitrex also play the game. Conversely, a name with a strong Latin accent on the board of an American firm may signal a heavy Vatican interest.

No one knows the net worth of the Catholic Church. Its endless treasures of art and ubiquitous churches have an inestimable value. The securities it holds are conservatively estimated at $5.6 billion. In its perennial fuss with leftists in the Italian government, the Vatican often refers to the example set in America, where Catholic and other organizations get tax breaks and relative freedom of economic action.

But with all these revelations on wealth amid rising taxes, that may be changing. After eight years of pressuring the Internal Revenue Service, Representative Wright Patman (D-Texas) has finally gotten a list of the nation’s 30,262 tax-exempt foundations. The telephone-directory-sized tome reads like a non-profit version of Who’s Who in American Business (the Ford Foundation, for instance, and Lyndon Johnson’s Johnson City Foundation).

Included are thousands of religious organizations, from the Afghan Jewish Foundation to San Francisco’s free-wheeling Methodist Glide Foundation.

Uncle Sam, with his increasingly voracious appetite for tax revenue, may have turned up a best-seller. And Patman, tracking down money for the nation’s needs, is unlikely to speedread the list. He figures all too much of what ordinarily would come to the government is siphoned off in the name of education, charity, and religion.

Patman’s House small-business subcommittee must ferret out the worthy from among the large number of tax-dodging abusers. It’s not an easy job, since ground rules for promoting “charitable, educational, scientific, or religious causes” have never been laid.

Churches are among the biggest users and abusers of taxation loopholes. Veteran newsman Alfred Balk in The Religion Business calculates the visible assets of American churches at nearly $80 billion—better than twice the worth of the top five business corporations in the nation. Paying neither the 52 per cent corporate income tax nor real-estate taxes, they compete and invest in everything material from Boeing Aircraft to eateries specializing in mushroomburgers.

The portfolio of Akron’s evangelical Cathedral of Tomorrow includes controlling interest in an apartment building and an electronics firm, with a shopping center and plastics company thrown in for good measure. Indeed, these Protestant entrepreneurs stretch religion to the point of owning the Real Form Girdle Company. Quipped a Women’s Wear Daily headline: “Rock of Ages on Firm Foundation.”

Cathedral pastor Rex Humbard wasn’t drawn in by the jibe. “There is nothing unusual about our owning business firms. All churches do. What difference does it make if it’s a girdle company or an airplane company?”

Examples abound of church groups capitalizing on their exemption from taxes on “unrelated business income.” In Dayton, Ohio, Technology Incorporated once complained it had been underbid on a $500,000 Air Force contract, because the winner, the University of Dayton, is Catholic and thus tax exempt. Another Catholic school, Loyola University in New Orleans, pays no taxes on profits from one of the city’s biggest radio and TV stations. Using the complex sale-and-leaseback system, the Knights of Columbus acquired the land under Yankee Stadium, and three Protestant congregations purchased a 435-room hotel in Dayton from the Hilton chain, reselling it later at a $450,000 profit.

If Patman has his way, the government will close some of the tax gap between the 52 per cent paid by corporations and the zero showing on the ledgers of tax-exempt competitors.

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