Papal Word Rate
Movie Rights?
In the excitement about the recent papal encyclical on – snort – love and eros, an interesting sea change in Vatican policies went under-reported. God, or at least his Vicar, is now charging by the word.
Last May the Secretariat of State of the Holy See issued a decree assigning the rights of all papal texts to Vatican publishing house. This included those published by Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope. Not much attention was paid at the time because it was considered a pro forma action. Much the same had been done at the election to the Pontificate of John Paul II in 1978.
This time though, the bills have begun going out. The Vatican sent a 15 thousand euro invoice – about 18 grand in real dollars – to the Italian publisher Baldini & Castoldi for an “instant book” of the new Pope’s writings assembled on the fly after his election. In a way, that is understandable. Joseph Ratzinger, as a private citizen, was not speaking for God before his elevation to the Throne of St. Peter. And Baldini & Castoldi, better known for publishing humor than theology, were visibly just trying to make a buck.
A somewhat less understandable case regards another Italian publishing house, Piemme, nailed for five thousand euro after it thoughtlessly included all nine pages of John Paul II’s spiritual testament in a book by the journalist Andrea Tornielli.
Leaving aside any questions of just why holy men bother to leave spiritual testaments behind them – it may, after all, be to help raise money for their successors – the whole issue does allow us to work out what the Pope’s freelance rate might be.
It’s probably roughly fair to suppose that the papal words run between 300 and 350 a book page, especially since the Vatican rather likes long words. There are nine pages. With just a little bit of rounding off and making things come out even, that turns out to be a three thousand word article – a relatively standard length, though not much used anymore after the extinction of the human attention span.
By a happy even number chance, the Pope is getting precisely two dollars a word at current exchange. That is the book rate, but these are divinely inspired words, not bland hack work. Cheap at the price.