Name: Render Unto Rome
Rating: 5.0 (1 reviews)
Author: Jason Berry

About this book

Summary

Book Summary

The Sunday collection in every Catholic church throughout the world is as familiar a part of the Mass as the homily and even Communion. There is no doubt that historically the Catholic Church has been one of the great engines of charity in history. But once a dollar is dropped in that basket, where does it go? How are weekly cash contributions that can amount to tens of thousands of dollars accounted for? Where does the money go when a diocese sells a church property for tens of millions of dollars? And what happens when hundreds of millions of dollars are turned over to officials at the highest ranks, no questions asked, for their discretionary use? The Roman Catholic Church is the largest organization in the world. The Vatican has never revealed its net worth, but the value of its works of art, great churches, property in Rome, and stocks held through its bank easily run into the tens of billions. Yet the Holy See as a sovereign state covers a mere 108 acres and has a small annual budget of about $280 million.

No major book has examined the church’s financial underpinnings and practices with such journalistic force. Today the church bears scrutiny by virtue of the vast amounts of money (nearly $2 billion in the United States alone) paid out to victims of clergy abuse. Amid mounting diocesan bankruptcies, bishops have been selling off whole pieces of the infrastructure - churches, schools, commercial properties - while the nephew of one of the Vatican’s most powerful cardinals engaged in a lucrative scheme to profiteer off the enormous downsizing of American church wealth.

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Media Reviews

"A troubling if blurry portrait of a corrupt, worldly Church hierarchy that's callously out of touch with a flock that expected something holier." - Publishers Weekly

"Money dominates the third of Jason Berry’s important books about the Catholic Church. Render Unto Rome probes deeply into the culture of the church. To painful questions about money and sex, Berry finds, the response of the church is always the same - secrecy and silence." - Thomas Powers

"The Catholic Church wants us to believe that it can reform itself from within. This book shows that it simply can’t. If you are an entrenched member of the hierarchy, you are not going to like this book. If you are a Catholic who believes that truth will lead to change - and that the Vatican needs to change, and change fast - Render unto Rome is your catechism." - James Carville

"A captivating read, Render to Rome is an astounding revelation of the church's financial system, and required reading for those who donate to the church or are interested in the ongoing effort to restore the credibility of the church and its hierarchy." - Sister Joan Chittister, OSB

"Once again Jason Berry is ahead of the curve when it comes to writing about the Catholic Church. Nothing about this book is superficial. This is a prodigiously researched work that looks at the church with both breadth and depth, and it is fascinating." - John M. Barry, author of Rising Tide and The Great Influenza

This information about Render Unto Rome was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Reader Reviews

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Michael S. Noone

Render unto Rome
This book is generally very well researched and referenced, although there are portions where the conclusions may be a little soft, primarily due to lack of input (essentially refusal) from Catholic Church hierarchy.

Having said, my "take", and I am Catholic, is that the infrastructure of the Catholic Church is badly (very badly!) in need of a "re-do". In any organization, whether business, charitable not-for-profits, churches, etc. there should be encouraged and effective input from the rank and file to management's decision makers. This is no less true of the Catholic Church, which is imbued with an archaic management structure which seemingly conveys little interest or ability in church membership input. Thus, with the identification of the pedophile issue in the 80's to the present, the reconciliation of needed action has too often been played out in a public forum as a contest between victims against the clergy.......how sad! From a spiritual perspective, my belief is that the Holy Spirit's presence is not the province of the hierarchy of the Church alone, but that he lives within all of us, and therefore, all voices of Christ should be heard.

Lastly, the book underscores the insulation and group-think of the Roman Curia and the Vatican to effectively address the challenges of the age, as the pedophile issue is testimony. The parallel analogy that translates in the book, is that this is no less different than businesses who do not effectively recruit and train personnel, and provide oversight and quality control for their operational activities.

In an observation of Pope John Paul's legacy, and while I have no doubt that while he was indeed a good and well-intended man, and likely deserving of the canonization that lies ahead, he was totally out-of-touch in addressing the pedophile issue. I would also argue that as our Church's "CEO", he would have been fired for his inaction and/or inability to address this very major problem if his job were in the business sector of a publicly-traded company. I quarrel with the thought that he would perhaps have been able to address the problem early in his papal career, but as the ravages of age diminished his abilities, it is reasonable to assume that he no longer had neither the energy nor the grasp of the problem to solve it. But that point is another issue.

So, in sum, I congratulate Mr. Berry for his attention in highlighting this problem to the root cause issues, which alas, seem no less different than the failings of any organization undergoing critical challenges and underperformance.

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