By Peter Tongue

YNOT EUROPE – The Catholic Church is one of the wealthiest entities on earth. While it’s impossible to determine exact figures for the church worldwide, in 2001 the Vatican’s financial department reported an annual income of 422.098 billion Italian lira (or about U.S. $254 million at the time) for the Holy See alone.

Now Buchreport, a trade publication for the German publishing industry, reports a portion of the church’s income is derived from pornography.

The Catholic Church, according to Buchreport, owns 100 percent of Weltbild Publishing Group, one of the largest multimedia publishing and distribution companies in Germany. Weltbild employs roughly 6,400 people and does approximately 1.7 billion euros in business each year, making it second only to Amazon in the German market. The publisher reportedly controls nearly 20 percent of the domestic bookstore market in Germany.

Weltbild’s online inventory currently includes more than 2,500 erotic books from a variety of publishers. Perhaps most notable among the offerings is a significant volume of volumns with titles like Anwaltshure (“Lawyer’s Whore”), Vögelbar (“Fuckable”) and [/i]Schlampen-Internat[/i] (“Sluts’ Boarding School”) — all published by Blue Panther Books, a Weltbild subsidiary.

Although a spokesman for the church told the German press, “Weltbild tries to prevent the distribution of possibly pornographic content,” the statement has not gained much traction with religious people or the publishing industry. In 2008, the Vatican sent a 70-page communication about Weltbild to the German bishops whose dioceses have shared ownership of the company for more than 30 years. The document outlined and decried the sale of questionable material and recommended the bishops unload the company.

Evidently, the bishops didn’t listen.