I guess you could always look at some articles.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,833509,00.html
From a CNN transcript, found here:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0504/05/acd.01.html
RUDI BAKHTIAR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's less than half a square mile and yet it's a nation unto itself. The Vatican, rich in centuries of priceless art and architecture. The Sistine Chapel, it's domed ceiling painted by Michelangelo. St. Peter's Basilica with a tomb of Christ's apostle Peter below the papal altar. The Pieta, the Vatican library, one of the world's richest repositories of ancient manuscripts. Put your arms around these priceless treasures and guess, what's the Vatican really worth?
JOHN ALLEN, CNN VATICAN ANALYST: People have these notions that there are vast islands of wealth here. I mean, the truth is, the Vatican's a pretty lean and mean operation.
BAKHTIAR:
Let's take a look at some of the numbers. The annual operating budget for the Vatican, $260 million. Property holdings of the Holy See, about $770 million. Add to that 18,000 pieces of art by the likes of Michelangelo, Raphael, Dante, Homer -- so what's the grand total? A whole lot less than you would expect. Yes, say the experts, the
Vatican does have tremendous artistic wealth, but the Vatican insists the precious artwork and real estate it possesses are held in trust for humanity. What does that mean? St. Peter's Basilica is valued at slightly more than $1.
ALLEN: Interestingly, the Vatican lists all of that stuff on its book at one euro, in terms of value. And that's because, from their point of view, it can never be sold. It can never be borrowed against. Therefore, it produces no revenue for them.
BAKHTIAR: We tried contacting Christie's and Sotheby's to inquire, hypothetically, about the fair market value of some of the Vatican's treasures, but we didn't have much luck. Nor did CNN's Vatican analyst John Allen when he tried to attach a price tag to some of these assets.
ALLEN: I once interviewed an Italian contractor to ask him, if you were to build St. Peter's Basilica today, how much would it cost you to put together? And he started trying to do the research to answer my question and called me back and said, can't be done. Nobody would build this building. By today's standards the cost would be so astronomic that it is simply impossible to calculate.
BAKHTIAR: At various times the Vatican has reportedly faced calls that it sell off its treasures to finance its operations or help the poor.
According to Allen, it's the Vatican's fundamental law these precious assets can never be sold.
Rudi Bakhtiar, CNN, New York.
This was taken from a less trusting source:
"The Vatican has large investments with the Rothschilds of Britain, France and America, with the Hambros Bank, with the Credit Suisse in London and Zurich. In the United States it has large investments with the Morgan Bank, the Chase-Manhattan Bank, the First National Bank of New York, the Bankers Trust Company, and others. The Vatican has billions of shares in the most powerful international corporations such as Gulf Oil, Shell, General Motors, Bethlehem Steel, General Electric, International Business Machines, T.W.A., etc. At a conservative estimate, these amount to more than 500 million dollars in the U.S.A. alone.
"In a statement published in connection with a bond prospectus, the Boston archdiocese listed its assets at Six Hundred and Thirty-five Million ($635,891,004), which is 9.9 times its liabilities. This leaves a net worth of Five Hundred and Seventy-one million dollars ($571,704,953). It is not difficult to discover the truly astonishing wealth of the church, once we add the riches of the twenty-eight archdioceses and 122 dioceses of the U.S.A., some of which are even wealthier than that of Boston.
"Some idea of the real estate and other forms of wealth controlled by the Catholic church may be gathered by the remark of a member of the New York Catholic Conference, namely 'that his church probably ranks second only to the United States Government in total annual purchase.' Another statement, made by a nationally syndicated Catholic priest, perhaps is even more telling. 'The Catholic church,' he said, 'must be the biggest corporation in the United States. We have a branch office in every neighborhood. Our assets and real estate holdings must exceed those of Standard Oil, A.T.&T., and U.S. Steel combined. And our roster of dues-paying members must be second only to the tax rolls of the United States Government.'
"The Catholic church, once all her assets have been put together, is the most formidable stockbroker in the world. The Vatican, independently of each successive pope, has been increasingly orientated towards the U.S. The Wall Street Journal said that the Vatican's financial deals in the U.S. alone were so big that very often it sold or bought gold in lots of a million or more dollars at one time.
"The Vatican's treasure of solid gold has been estimated by the United Nations World Magazine to amount to several billion dollars. A large bulk of this is stored in gold ingots with the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, while banks in England and Switzerland hold the rest. But this is just a small portion of the wealth of the Vatican, which in the U.S. alone, is greater than that of the five wealthiest giant corporations of the country. When to that is added all the real estate, property, stocks and shares abroad, then the staggering accumulation of the wealth of the Catholic church becomes so formidable as to defy any rational assessment.
"The Catholic church is the biggest financial power, wealth accumulator and property owner in existence. She is a greater possessor of material riches than any other single institution, corporation, bank, giant trust, government or state of the whole globe. The pope, as the visible ruler of this immense amassment of wealth, is consequently the richest individual of the twentieth century. No one can realistically assess how much he is worth in terms of billions of dollars."
And I think back about how the pope, the wealthiest man on this planet, walked up to that poor little Italian man lying in that rubble, put his hand on his head, and said, "Bless you," and then walked away and just left him there. That has got to be the height of hypocrisy. And then Sen. Kennedy, the pope's boy over in the United States makes the big pitch to the U.S. people to foot the bill to repair that devastated village, right in the pope's backyard. What a set-up!
There is no place in the New Testament where there is any hint or any record of any kind that Peter was in Rome. None.
