My family has been catholic…well…I geuess since there was a Catholic to be, and I’m pretty sure they don’t tithe. The church doesn’t require tithing, as far as I know. There is a collection plate every week, and people give what they can (actually, it’s a basket…actually, it’s two baskets.)
I think my family gives $10 per week. Now, if that’s the average (and I think it is, since the donaton envelope says a suggested donation of $10), then let’s do some math. At least 100 families giving $10 a week amounts to $52,000/year. That’s enough, I would think, to run a church. I can’t imagine the electric and power bills for the house and rectory are that much. And a priest doesn’t need a large salary. And my estimate of 100 families is also a small one, it’s probsably closer to 250, since there are three seperate masses (two sunday morning and one saturday afternoon.) But I digress, my point is that I’ve never known the church to actually tithe. That is, ask people to give x% of their income off the top, before taxes, etc…Of course, if a new church was to be built, I have no doubts that the parish would ask for larger and more donations, but certainly not by going door to door with an accountant and tax returns.
The analysis above is woefully incomplete. Even assuming there is only one priest in the parish… does the rectory have an office? Manned, even part-time, with a secretary? If not, I don’t see how one priest can be “on duty” to handle the phone calls that come in during the day as well as handling routine daily duties around the church.
How are the grounds kept up? Who mows, who weeds, who repairs the broken hinges on the kneelers?
How about insurance? How much does your basic liability policy cover, and what does it cost? Do you need riders to cover special events, such as the parish picnic, or the appreciation dinner?
How about seasonal decorations? How much do the flowers for Easter and Christmas cost?
It’s true a priest doesn’t require much salary - but he needs a medical plan, doesn’t he? How about funding a retirement plan? Where will this priest live when he retires, and who will pay for that?
danceswithcats, I have never heard of such a practice in my 36 years of being a practicing (some times more than others, alas) Catholic. Having said that, I’ve met priests whom I can easily believe would do it. Of course I’ve met others who wouldn’t even mention the word tithe in a sermon on generosity.
I do know that there are, IMNSHO, exactly two people who have a right to talk about how much of my income goes to the church: myself and God. Like LMM, anyone demanding to see my tax returns would exit posthaste, no matter who they might be.
BTW, asterion, because of the various cases used by Latin for nouns there’s a real dearth of web-based Latin translation programs out there. This is one I’ve used before that’s not too bad, but still make sure you have more salt than with Babelfish.
Just seven posts earlier, I expressed my disapproval of tithing.
But like Bricker, I also served on my church’s finance committee. Take a 40’ x 80’ building with a 15’ ceiling (small by church standards). That’s 48,000 cubic feet that needs to be heated and cooled every week, not to mention the church offices and any other assorted rooms.
Pretty much as soon as the church is opened, you have to deal with maintenance. Ever see a bid to repair a church roof? It’s not just tarpaper and shingles.
My church was in a tough neighborhood. Several times a year we were burglarized. Then there’s the problem of “100 families a week” (with a lot of them elderly) simply stepping on to the property every week. What if one of our loyal 80-year old members slipped on the ice and broke her hip. Insurance costs are astronomical. And so on and so on.
I think it’s reprehensible that any church would try to strong-arm it’s members into giving more than they can afford. But, when you voluntarily join an organization – any organization – you should have some appreciation of the costs, and contribute accordingly.
Priest are not monks, they do not take a vow of poverty. They are usually supported so that they are living about the same level of lifestyle as their parishioners. The parish is expected to provide all normal employment compensation in addition to cash wages (so that they can have a car, buy clothes, enjoy the vacation time to whic they are entitled to, etc…), namely, retirement and health benefits which is now approaching close to $20k/yr.
On top of that, the parish provides room and board for the priest: another $10k/yr (in addition to the initial cost of purchasing/building the residence).
And so, it costs a parish about $40-50k for one priest.
That leaves maybe $2k/yr for parish expenses. The cost for the bread and wine for Mass for one year is about that much.
And $10 per week for one family? For the average family, that would be about 1% or less of their gross wages, which is just at the national average for Catholics. Protestants give a little over 3% of their gross income.
Actually, my parish does encourage tithing- but not the whole 10% to the parish. They encourage 10% total, some (5%, I think ) to the parish and the rest to other charitable organizations. There’s no checking on it with tax returns or anything like that, and i’m quite certain that almost no one actually gives the 5% to the parish.
I’m not sure how accurate your estimate of contributions is. In my parish,there are about 250 families with kids in the school, about another 500 with kids in religious education, and certainly another 250 (actually, I’m sure it’s many more) without children in either. That’s at least 1000 families. At $10 per family, that’s $10,000 per week. The collection is only that large at Christmas and Easter when the church is standing room only . It’s usually about $4-6000 a week. The families with children in the parish school are required to contribute about $7 per week. They are the only people with a “required” contribution. If they don’t meet the requirement, they will still be permitted to send their children to the school- at the higher, non-subsidized , non-parishioner tuition rate. The parish tuition rate + contributions is way less than the non-parish rate, but it’s still like pulling teeth to actually get the contributions. If there wasn’t a downside , plenty of them would likely not contribute at all.
And yeah, my parish does actually need that much money (and more, actually- there is other income outside of the collection plates) . We have a very old cathedral-like church, which needs to be heated, cooled and lit, and just had to have the air-conditioning replaced. We have four priests, a secretary, a housekeeper, an organist, teenagers to answer the door and phones during evening and weekend office hours and two handymen who work part-time for the church and part-time for the school. The parish subsidizes the school to some extent, the fees for religious education don’t cover the costs (and no one is turned away because they can’t pay the fee) , and there are of course the decorations, insurance, office supplies and equipment.
My father was raised Catholic and when he married my mother (who was raised Southern Baptist), they attended services at a Catholic church in Tulsa for a couple of years before and a couple of years after I was born. I don’t know the details, but apparently they left the church because he was tired of the church’s aggressive collection techniques.
I was raised as a Catholic. The local church decided to build a new fancier church. They passed an extra collection plate around on Sundays, and that was that. Nobody came to our house with an acountant, nobody was cast into the outer darkness. There was no tithing, as some people describe it. Things must have really changed lately. It sounds more like the local pastor is overstepping his bounds by a huge margin.
A few years back we rehabbed and enlarged our church and school so we had a huge fundraiser. We were sent letters asking to commit to a dollar amount. They suggested an amount ($3,000 over 3 years) but stressed that this was how much the church was hoping to receive without knowing any financial particulars. That was the extent of the “pressure.”
I’m sure there are some parishes where you are subjected to high pressure tactics for both weekly giving and special fundraisers. How different priests run their parishes varies widely because they have unique personalities. But being strong-armed into donating is not a universal practice.