I am glad Kate is feeling much better,however

[portocristo]

Watching the news about the horrendous rubbish problem in Birmingham,this was followed by Kates film clip rambling about Windermere saying we need to connect with nature and couldn’t help thinking it was inappropriate.I bet cancer sufferers in Birmingham would love to do this instead of holding down a job worrying about col doing chores that I bet she never does and have stinking rubbish with rats in the streets. I have no problem with her video but thought the timing was so off. They sometimes need to read the room.

Yes I have visited the Vatican twice and it’s utterly ridiculous to compare the executive decision-making head of the Catholic Church which is a global organisation with 1.406 billion members to the British monarchy which is a figurehead non-management institution which serves a population of something like 68 million.

There is no comparison as the vast wealth of the Vatican is filtered down to every priest and Catholic Church in the world, so I don’t understand the point you are making?

It’s like comparing the president of a vast global chain of shops to the caretaker of one branch!

The whole point of my post was to highlight the modest way in which Pope Francis lived, how he carried out his role with humility, and how he demonstrated that it wasn’t necessary to have vast wealth to be an effective leader.

I expanded the point to say that vast wealth actually gets in the way of a figurehead role because it separates you from the people you are meant to serve eg William and homelessness.

Also, despite a massively wider decision-making remit, the Pope has no private wealth, in fact as a priest he has very few personal possessions at all.

King Charles on the other hand, has huge personal private wealth and despite that, has leveraged his public role to ensure that he pays less tax on it, unlike every ordinary citizen he apparently serves, an arrangement to which our MPs have capitulated with very little protest, something which is frankly an insult to every single taxpayer in the UK!

I think the worst examples of excess wealth I have seen in the RC Church were in South America. Gold altars , beggars at the door but then I find the Church of England excessively ornate.

You are criticising the monarchy for its vast wealth, yet it's ok for the Catholic church to also have vast wealth in an organisation that is supposed to be charitable to the poor etc? Are you sure that the Pope never benefitted from that in any shape or form?

It's the same difference. It's all about the wealth. There may be a difference in scale but not in practice. I've been in Buckingham Palace (several times, including an investiture), Kensington Palace (3 times) and the Vatican museums. Massive opulence in all of them. In the Vatican, by the time we got to the Sistine Chapel, we had been exposed to such excess, that we couldn't actually handle any more.

Why isn't the church selling a lot of that off to benefit the poor? Any more than Charles is divesting himself of any of his huge wealth for the benefit of the poor!

It has an impact on all of us; that’s the point!

The official line is that the RF costs us around £86 million a year.

Republic UK says the royal family costs us an estimated £510 million a year once security costs, money received by the sovereign and heir from the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, and costs to local councils for hosting royal engagements, are added to the amount the RF receives from the Treasury.

Let’s take a conservative view and say that the real cost is something like £230 million a year. Is that value for money do you think?

Does no one else find it outrageous that we don’t have a precise transparent break down of figures in 2025?

Does no one else find it outrageous that our cash poor local councils are charged to host some royal engagements?

Indeed I believe a considerable number of charities are charged to have a member of the RF come and visit!

None of this is transparent and it needs to be!

And, as previously mentioned, why do the RF receive tax breaks on their private inherited wealth? And why are they warned ahead by Parliament when any discussions about their finances are due to come up?

Why do special laws apply to them concerning the land they own, so that a lot of this wealth remains concealed?

And why is any discussion of any potential financial dodginess on behalf of the RF banned from being discussed in the HofC?

These questions matter very much if only in the interest of fairness and basic social justice.

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/04/22/aging-catholic-sisters-struggle-to-afford-adequate-care

Nuns have to take a vow of poverty. Priests do not:

https://asec-sldi.org/news/general/vows-catholic-nuns/

It’s actually not the same difference at all.

You obviously aren’t aware of the fact that the Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of healthcare and education globally. So the majority of its vast wealth as you call it, is continually dispersed among ordinary parishioners, the poor, and the sick.

Not that I am here to defend the Catholic Church. I was making a specific point about Pope Francis and his leadership style which you continue to ignore mainecooncatonahottinroof

And you are deliberately ignoring the other main point I was making about King Charles’s obscene personal wealth getting in the way of doing his job. But you choose not to respond to that. I wonder why?

I am sure even you can understand the hypocrisy of the Prince of Wales declaring an end to homelessness when he will take on ownership or management of about five castles, six massive estates, and many other residences upon the death of his father?

At this point several monarchists will no doubt say; but some of them are state-owned, not all are private! And yes that’s true but the staffing and maintenance of all of them and their grounds are met by the Sovereign Grant I believe, and they all require security, so the financial arrangements between private and public are just nicely mangled enough that they are too complex for the average person to understand! How very convenient!

Of course there will be pockets of corruption in the RC church too, as in any global organisation, but your average parish priest or group of nuns are scraping by.

I fail to see the similarity between that and the monarchy, even if they were on the same scale?

If you are talking about the buildings in which the institutions are housed then there are similarities yes.

The buildings of the Vatican were originally built to preside over the huge Papal States, or territories of central Italy, over which the pope had sovereignty from 756 to 1870. That is why they are opulent. They bear no relation to the wealth of the Catholic Church today.

Like certain UK palaces, they can’t be sold because they are part of the cultural heritage of Italy and their upkeep is paid for by tourism and some state subsidy, although I believe that the most recent restoration of the Sistine Chapel was paid for by a Japanese tv company, not the Italian people.

I suppose the Pope does benefit aesthetically by being able to stare up at the ceiling of the Sistine chapel but he doesn’t have any private or personal wealth at all. And that is my point. The Pope didn’t gain financially in any way from doing his job. Whereas, according to Forbes, Charles inherited £500 million from his mother when he became King.

Just take that figure in for a moment and ask yourself, why is everyone so relaxed about this obscene wealth?

Does no one care that the RF’s wealth is increasingly massively year on year and that nonetheless they have tax exemptions while the rest of us are getting poorer?

Is it right that the RF’s finances are so lacking in transparency and they are allowed to hide their wills when we are not?

How about you answer those last three specific questions mainecooncatonahottinroof instead of replying with a meaningless smiley?

That’s interesting BemusedAmerican
you know more about it than me.

Typically misogynistic of the RC church!

https://canonlawmadeeasy.com/2008/11/20/the-priesthood-and-the-vow-of-poverty/

Well said @Therovingsunlight77

I could have written your posts myself, so agree with your details about our monarchy.
It seems like you get the smiling face emoji too (I used to get them on every post I did!)

The claim that charities have to pay to host a royal visit has been raised on here before, perhaps by you under a previous name @Therovingsunlight77 but neither time was any evidence provided - are you able to supply any?

How do you know what reactions other posters get to their posts? I thought it was only visible to the poster themself? Do some see and others don't?

The fact that Republic UK figures are quoted as some kind of unbiased accuracy is laughable.

The Sovereign Grant is based on a % of profits from the Crown Estate.

I'm happy to live in a Constitutional Monarchy, 1 of the most stable democracies in the World. I currently see no benefit to changing to a Republican system, and Republic UK have done nothing to reassure me (and I started off with lukewarm Republican leanings).

Poverty does not solely exist in Monarchies.

Because Rovingsunlight said so in her post I was replying to?!! You obviously didn't read it
Don't worry I don't have special powers 😅

yet time and time again, anyone who is not slating them gets called SS/stans/fans and so on.

😂😂😂😂here's a few for you !

I mean, the sausage story is stupid and petulant, but on the other hand, can you imagine being one of two siblings, yet just because of accident of birth, your older brother, his children and grandchildren are in line to be looked after their whole lives, only getting richer and richer, while you know that you will only be more and more irrelevant as time goes on, and this is reinforced by everyone you live with, including the staff serving dinner to two children? I have 2 sons. I don't serve their meals based on who was born first, or who is my favourite! The whole institution of the RF is designed to foster these resentments. The clever ones like Anne and Edward don't care because they know that the more they toe the line, the more they get the privileges of being related to The King. Others, like Andrew and Harry, do.

I was given the top of my Grandad's boiled egg - God knows how I should be feeling 😂😂😂

The reaction emojis don’t include a smiling face 🤷‍♀️

eta just a laughing one

Talk about nitpicking! It's the laughing face! Goodness me...

My bad. Should have said 'laughing' not 'smiling'. I am prostrate at your feet in abject apology 🤣

Therovingsunlight77 · Today 00:05

Excellent post. I agree with everything there.

Does no one else find it outrageous that our cash poor local councils are charged to host some royal engagements?

I'd also add the way the monarch and heir are double-dipping in the public purse pocketing rent from government bodies and their own armed forces for the use of facilities situated on duchy land.

I have never raised that particular point on here because I have just found out about it myself. I will be doing further research about it though and how the arrangements work in detail. If the detailed information is available and not hidden to the general public as most of it is.

I just want to put on record that I do not believe you or @Spectre8 or some others I can't remember the names of because I can't keep up with name changing, anyway to get back on topic, I don't believe any of you are members of the Sussex Squad. I would've described you as a fan or a stan either. I just think we don't always agree on the actions of members of the Royal family.

Yeah wasn’t there something about them renting Duchy land to the NHS as well as the Army, the Macmillan cancer charity and the RNLI in that recent documentary?

I’m going to see if further details are available on that too. But I remember being appalled by the fact that not only are they making profits out of these organisations, but they are not paying tax on it! Presumably the information is hidden though?

I seem to remember that Dartmoor was an example of the land which the Duchy rents to the Army? And wasn’t there something about them charging rent for Dartmoor prison which is no longer used? The Duchy charges the state maintenance costs for the empty building, presumably so that when the freehold runs out, it will return to the Duchy in good order for them to use for for something else?

I would like to know who, if anyone, in Government, as our representatives, has oversight and approval of these arrangements? The financial arrangements of the forces presumably fall under the remit of the Home Secretary? What about the rest? And on what criteria are these decisions made and approved?

If, as the RF argues, the Duchy land belongs to us the people, like large bits of coastline, then why aren’t these accounts available to the public? They can’t have it both ways and own tracts of public land but then don’t publish the accounts! And not pay tax upon the income? Why are we all so sleepy and accepting of this?

It isn't just the Royal family. The aristocracy in general are extremely hierarchical in nature. To be fair though the same hapoens in the US which has neither but has hierarchy based on wealth. Humans seem to be naturally hierarchical in nature, which i don't agree with but which I'm not sure you can combat.