We should start by noting that Catholic charity work is extensive and widely considered a crucial part of the nation’s social safety net. By itself, Catholic Charities USA, has more than 2,500 local agencies that serve 10 million people annually, said Mary L. Gautier, a senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, an institute at Georgetown University that studies the church.
And Catholic Charities is supplemented by a panoply of other Catholic-affiliated groups, Gautier said, including “St. Vincent De Paul societies, social justice committees, soup kitchens, food pantries, and other similar programs organized independently by thousands of Catholic parishes each year.”
For a variety of reasons, it’s difficult to quantify exactly how big Catholic-backed charity is, but we tried our best to sift the data with the help of the National Center for Charitable Statistics, a project of the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.
The first question we asked is whether the sum of all Catholic-sponsored charity amounts to half of all charitable activity by private groups in the United States. We started with the biggest, Catholic Charities USA, then worked outward.
In 2010, Catholic Charities USA reported expenditures of between $4.2 billion and $4.4 billion, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which publishes an annual list of the 400 biggest charities in the United States, ranked by the amount of donations they receive. This enabled it to rank near the top of the 400 list, behind two major social-services charities — the United Way and the Salvation Army, neither of which is affiliated with the Catholic church.
Meanwhile, Catholic News Service has noted a few other Catholic organizations that made the Chronicle’s annual 400 list, including Father Flanagan Boys Home and Covenant House. This excludes Catholic universities, which mainly provide higher education; hospitals, which are categorized separately from social services; and groups that focus on overseas work.
Let’s assume that other Catholic groups that didn’t crack the top 400 list spent six times what Catholic Charities USA spent, a multiplier that experts we contacted thought was reasonable. That would make the figure about $26 billion.
Then if you suppose that the 18,000 Catholic parishes spent an average of $200,000 on the needy every year beyond what they contribute to any of these charitable organizations, a number also considered plausible by our experts, that would add another $3.6 billion to the total.
All told, this would equal about $30 billion. So how does that slice compare to the entire pie?
National Center for Charitable Statistics researchers tallied up expenditures by nonprofits in the broad category of “human services,” which includes nutrition, employment assistance, legal aid, housing, disaster relief and youth development. In 2010, the most recent year available, they came up with total expenditures of $168 billion in that category.
Yep, Rome has found a daisy of a cash cow on planet Earth.
Source?
He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Let’s assume that other Catholic groups that didn’t crack the top 400 list spent six times what Catholic Charities USA spent, a multiplier that experts we contacted thought was reasonable. That would make the figure about $26 billion.
Then if you suppose that the 18,000 Catholic parishes spent an average of $200,000 on the needy every year beyond what they contribute to any of these charitable organizations, a number also considered plausible by our experts, that would add another $3.6 billion to the total.
All told, this would equal about $30 billion. So how does that slice compare to the entire pie?
Man....I'll tell you....that's a lot of iffing you got going on there.
Now, I did find this little item from http://nineteensixty-four.blogspot.com/2012/08/spot-difference.html/ The sources cited were CARA National Parish Inventory (2000), ICSC Diocesan Profiles (2002-2007),CARA/Emerging Models (2010)<
Amount given weekly by parish household in 2000 was $8.33 ($433.16 yearly) compared to 2010 at $9.57 ($497.64 yearly)
I'll repost the numbers from barna. Notice this is giving to all non-profit groups.
Christians tend to be the most generous group of donors. An examination of the three dominant subgroups within the Christian community showed that evangelicals, the 7% of the population who are most committed to the Christian faith, donated a mean of $4260 to all non-profit entities in 2007. Non-evangelical born again Christians, who represent another 37% of the public, donated a mean of $1581. The other 42% of the Christian population, who are aligned with a Christian church but are not born again, donated a mean of $865. Overall, the three segments of the Christian community averaged donations of $1426.
The Christian giving was divided between Protestants (mean of $1705) and Catholics ($984).
btw...I noticed you didn't answer my question on whether you tithe of the gross or the net.
Yes you also have Catholic charities:
Catholic Relief Services gave over $13 million to pro-abortion group in 2012
How Catholic Charities Lost Its Soul
Catholic Charities—and the same could be said about the Association of Jewish Family and Children's Agencies or the Lutheran Services in America—has become over the last three decades an arm of the welfare state, with 65 percent of its $2.3 billion annual budget now flowing from government sources and little that is explicitly religious, or even values-laden, about most of the services its 1,400 member agencies and 46,000 paid employees provide. http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=758