You are aware you were condemning the LDS Church for not making their finances public yet I didn't find anywhere that the Coptic Orthodox Church made their finances public either.
Because you're looking on the internet, and I guess that's not where the information is. We're a very small church in the USA, after all. Maybe 200 parishes in the entire country, at last count. (Which sounds like a lot, but when you compare it to Catholic, Protestant, or Eastern Orthodox, it isn't.)
I mean, it took me a little while before I was able to find the average salary for our priests (which again, was $8K lower than the national average), and that was more or less at random (at the LinkedIn page), so maybe it's out there somewhere and you and I just don't know it. If I knew where it was, I'd link you to it myself, as I already have with regard to the contact for the diocese in Bolivia, the discussion on Tasbeha.org concerning priest's salaries and benefits, and so on. I am very open about all this, because I trust my Church as an institution. I don't believe it would have existed for 2,000 years in such a harsh environment as Egypt (and Libya and Sudan) if it weren't built on a solid foundation of Christ and the apostolic teachings, not profit-minded business acumen.
The name of the game is transparency. The Mormon Church is
purposely not transparent. That's different than just being small/new, having most of your resources in a foreign language (Arabic), or whatever other factors might be impacting the search for more info about Coptic finances. Again, I've personally spoken to bishops and monks regarding this stuff, and they've never shied away from it. There's no reason to.
But I would say at the point when your Church is operating vast ranches, for-profit tourist locations, and other similar places, then they naturally invite more scrutiny, and they ought to be able to handle that appropriately, instead of acting as shady as they do. In other words: If the Coptic Orthodox Church -- or any other church, for that matter -- were operating "Coptic Disneyland", or had some giant ranch covering half of New Jersey or wherever, or had a bunch of real estate companies in some kind of investment portfolio of for-profit businesses that it runs, then I'd be making the same argument about them. None of this occurs in a vacuum. Your church is getting the criticism it is from me because of
how it operates itself like a for-profit corporation. That has no analogue in how the vast majority of Christian churches operate. You can certainly dredge up mega-churches that are basically like malls, but that's not the majority of churches in the world, whereas the LDS church operates as it does not because some small fraction of it has gotten out of control with commercialism replacing faith, but because that's how it sees fit to operate
as a matter of principle. Were that not the case, it would not have its hands in so many different money-making ventures. That's a huge difference, and you're not addressing it by continuing to ask me about my own Church's finances. The ethos is entirely different.
