Catholic World News News Feature

Vatican earned unusual profit from postage stamps in 2005 February 05, 2007

The Vatican reaped an extraordinary profit of €4.5 million (nearly $6 million) on the sale of postage stamps during the 2005 calendar year, officials have revealed.

The death of Pope John Paul II provoked a rush of demand for the last Vatican stamps engraved with his image. Then the first stamps issued with the likeness of Pope Benedict XVI, appearing in June, were also popular. During the period before the election of the new Pontiff, the Vatican camerlengo, Cardinal Eduardo Martinez Somalo, authorized the issued another set of stamps valid only for the interregnum period, which were quickly snapped up by collectors. With the election of Benedict XVI, these stamps lost all postal value.

Vatican postage stamps are generally prized by collectors, and each time the Vatican issues a new series of stamps, most of the available specimens are bought by philatelists rather than people who actually intended to use the postal services. Thus the sales yield a tidy profit for the Vatican-- which, like several other small sovereign bodies, is sometimes good-naturedly called a “postage-stamp state.”