The Vatican has found itself in the middle of a critical financial crisis, which threatens to jeopardize the livelihood of retired clergy and staff worldwide
Except they have billions in stolen art and could liquidate it at any point. If not trillions, actually.
Nobody knows exactly what Vatican has but Porphyry Basin in the Vatican Museum is estimated to be worth 2$ billion alone (it was commissioned by Emperor Nero).
Vatican could literally end the world hunger with their treasure hoard.
Their art collection is so massive, containing such crazy rare items, many cannot have a price tag as they are literally priceless. It's impossible to calculate its value due to the extreme rarity, or because anything like it to compare it's value to is also in the Vatican collection.
When they sell 1 priceless art item, they can sustain themselves for a year. They have hundreds of thousands of those items, if not millions.
Saying the Vatican goes bankrupt sounds like "Elon Musk struggles to pay for his groceries".
Sounds to me their massive stream of money is declining and they want to scare people into giving them more money.
Though if the idea that high value art is actually a money laundering/moving scheme is true, this might not be the case. The idea is that no one or few people actually want to spend millions on art but pretend they do as a front to spend millions on something else.
They could probably save some money by reducing the "cover up pedophile priests" item in their budget.
Vatican could literally end the world hunger with their treasure hoard.
No they couldn’t. They’d end up making a bunch of warlords into billionaires while the regular people would go on starving. The only way to end world hunger is grassroots economic development and education (especially for women). You can’t do that by dumping billions of dollars into those countries. The problem is very tricky and the work is long and arduous.