Thanksgiving is over. You're as stuffed as the turkey, but your conscience feels lighter since you gave a little money to one of those help-the-hungry charities that make a big push around the holidays. And now comes a bunch of new surveys telling us that hunger is a bigger problem than ever.

To wit: Bread for the World reports that more than 1.02 billion people across the globe go hungry every day -- an increase of more than 100 million from a year ago, while in the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture just recorded the highest rate of "food insecurity" since the USDA began tracking the measurement in 1995; more than one in seven American households are without "regular and reliable access to nutritious food," the department says.

Well, that's frustrating. And it kind of makes you want to high-five Sarah Silverman, whose recent YouTube shtick about how the pope should sell the Vatican and use the proceeds to cure world hunger seems more relevant than ever.

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In her video monologue, which ran on Bill Maher's trenchantly irreligious HBO show, Silverman pondered a paradox that has struck a lot of people over the centuries, many of them devout Catholics -- namely, the ostentation of Rome versus the grinding poverty in much of the rest of the world. So she muses on this with her characteristically vexatious (and vulgar) innocence, and puts the question to His Holiness:

"What is the Vatican worth, like, 500 billion dollars? This is great, sell the Vatican, take a big chunk of that money, build a gorgeous condominium for you and all your friends to live in. All the amenities: swimming pool, tennis court -- water slide! And with the money left over, feed the whole f---ing world." She also made a few other profane observations, and wrapped up her argument in three funny/blasphemous/puerile minutes.

Except of course for the vulgarity part, Silverman's riff actually put me in mind of Mother Teresa.

Now mention the "Saint of the Gutters" in the same breath as a potty-mouthed comedian like Sarah Silverman and you'd better duck fast before folks starting chucking stuff at your head. But the late saint of Calcutta (yes, she has only been beatified, a step short of full canonization, but who is going to quibble?) could be pretty outspoken on poverty, too. Indeed, when she visited the Vatican, Mother Teresa would pester Pope John Paul II about doing more to help the poor, once gesturing at the cavernous interior of St. Peter's Basilica and scolding the pontiff, "Think of how many homeless people you could fit in here!"

Yes, the Vatican could do more, and should.

But perhaps not as much as most folks assume. Contrary to popular belief, the Vatican doesn't actually have huge financial reserves -- less than $1 billion in real estate, and a few hundred million in gold deposits (smart investments these days) and stock portfolios. A mid-size American university would be in better shape.

In fact, the Vatican relies largely on annual donations from wealthy churches in the United States and Germany to fund its yearly operations, and it donates anything given to the pope himself to charity. But it still ran a deficit of more than $23 million in 2008, prompting officials to raise the retirement age of its 2,600 workers by two years. (Lucky for the pope his job is for life. Imagine Obama trying that move.) So liquidity is a constant problem.

"Selling the Vatican," as Silverman suggested, also wouldn't be quite as easy as it sounds. St. Peter's is an awesome church but it'd make an awful condo. The conversion costs would be astronomical and the heating bills would be hell -- all that marble, you know. Not to mention working around the landmark status.

Auctioning off the Vatican's works of art sounds like a nice alternative, but much of the stuff is fixed in place, done by Renaissance artists for a particular spot. How do you move the Sistine Chapel ceiling to the Trump Tower? It wouldn't even be a chapel anymore, either. And do you want to break up one of the great collections of Western civilization and send it into the hands of private collectors? Not to mention the hit on the Italian tourism industry, which supports thousands of Italian families.

The other obvious problem is that St. Peter's is sacred space, an oversized tombstone, really, marking the spot where the apostle was crucified by the Romans. People don't much like living on a cemetery (viz. "Poltergeist"), and selling St. Peter's would strike Catholics much the same as a proposal to sell the Western Wall in Jerusalem would go down with Jews.

As for the pope himself, while the perks and the titles are nice, a pontiff's accommodations aren't very grand anymore -- "institutional" would be a nice way of describing the decor of the papal apartments -- and his lifestyle is less so. Sure, a pope is guaranteed "three hots and a cot," as they say. But John Paul II had no possessions to bequeath in his last will and testament (one of the rarely cited benefits of celibacy is no inheritance or children to fight over it). His apartment had to be completely renovated, as it was sorely in need of repair. His successor, Benedict XVI, has rather high-end tastes in liturgical wear that could certainly be toned down, and he had a piano and his personal library moved to the Vatican. But he doesn't own a computer and writes his own material in longhand. For him, there is no retirement plan, except for eternity.

The larger problem, really, is that even a radical downsizing at the Vatican wouldn't put much of a dent in world poverty.

As the Associated Press's Rome bureau reported, the annual report on the state of world hunger from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization shows that poor countries need $44 billion in annual agricultural aid, compared with the current $7.9 billion, to adequately feed the world's poor. "Overall," the AP's Nicole Winfield writes, "an annual net investment in agriculture of $83 billion is needed to feed the world." Alas, a Vatican fire sale isn't the answer.

Then again, I suspect that all the outrage directed at Sister Sarah's remarks (e.g., the Catholic League) may miss the point -- though I may be presuming too much, as Silverman's vulgarity and parody may or may not have a point, besides getting her notice. Still, let's be charitable and assume that Silverman's "filthy diatribe" (Bill Donohue's words) was in fact pointing out that selling the Vatican is obviously absurd. Instead, the point is that everyone needs to sacrifice something. Which is why Silverman launched her sketch by saying that she was upset at having to see these hungry people so vividly on her 48-inch high-def plasma TV. In other words, it's silly for so many of us, including celebrity comedians like Sarah Silverman, to give the homeless guy on the street the few dollars we would have spent on our favorite Starbucks coffee drink that morning and then feel like we've done something to end hunger.

Whether Silverman meant to or not, her comedy underscores the serious point that -- pace Mother Teresa -- we need to focus as much on justice as we do on charity. And that goes for the Vatican, too.

When Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) was walking through the Vatican gardens one day, the story goes, "Good Pope John" inquired of a laborer how he was making out. When the workman confessed that the pope didn't pay enough to feed his family, John vowed to do something about it. On hearing news of the pope's plans to boost the Vatican payroll, his aides protested, saying it would cut into the Holy See's charitable donations. "Justice comes before charity," he told them.

That's a view with which many of those in the poorest regions of the world would concur.

"Poverty in the world has to be dealt with by justice. There are other big buildings that need to be moved and sold -- all those big structures, all those unjust financial and economic structures in the world. Those are the things to move, so that the poor can survive," Archbishop John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan of Abuja told reporters when asked about Silverman's piece. "The irony and sadness of it is that we know what to do. And it can be done . . . but we don't have the political or spiritual will to do it."

Exhorting individuals and nations to summon that will has been a priority for the current pope, and one that he has set out in blatantly liberal terms in his latest encyclical, "Charity in Truth," and earlier in November in a powerful address to the World Summit on Food Security in Rome.

In that speech, Benedict blasted the tendency to view hunger as an inevitable part of the system -- the cost of doing business, you might say -- and said "it is essential to start redefining the concepts and principles that have hitherto governed international relations."

"If the aim is to eliminate hunger," he continued, "international action is needed not only to promote balanced and sustainable economic growth and political stability, but also to seek out new parameters -- primarily ethical but also juridical and economic ones -- capable of inspiring the degree of cooperation required to build a relationship of parity between countries at different stages of development."

That's not as simple, or funny, a solution as the one Sarah Silverman proposed in her three-minute skit. But I bet she'd be good with the pope's recommendations. As long as she can keep her big-screen TV.


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