KINGSTON, Jamaica. Ask who owns the most land on earth and most people reach for a king, a billionaire or a mining giant. Ask which institution owns the most land in the name of God and the answer is less glamorous, less documented and far larger than most Jamaicans would guess.
The Roman Catholic Church is estimated to hold about 177 million acres worldwide. That is roughly 71.6 million hectares, an estate larger than metropolitan France and about 65 times the size of Jamaica.
No other church comes close. Combine the next seven churches with published land totals and they hold about two million hectares between them, less than three per cent of the Catholic figure.
This is not a story about faith. It is a story about property: who holds it, how they acquired it, what it earns, and why so much of it remains invisible even to the churches that own it.
The Number Everyone Quotes
The 177 million acre figure traces back to a 2011 estimate and has been repeated so often that it now reads as fact. It is not. It is an informed approximation of parishes, schools, hospitals, convents, cemeteries, farms and forests held by thousands of separate Catholic legal entities.
Nobody has a complete inventory, including the Vatican. The most serious attempt belongs to GoodLands, a mapping organisation founded by the American cartographer Molly Burhans, which has digitised most Catholic holdings in the United States. When she began, Church officials could offer her little more than a static map of diocesan boundaries.
That gap matters. A landowner that cannot see its own portfolio cannot manage it, value it or defend it.
Why There Is No Honest Top 100
A ranking of 100 denominations would be easy to publish and impossible to verify. Most church property is held at the level of the congregation, the diocese or a religious order, not by a central body. Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal and evangelical churches own tens of thousands of sites worldwide, but none publishes a global land total.
So Jamaica Homes took a stricter approach. A church appears in our ranking only where its own reports, a government record or a documented investigation gives a land figure. Where only a flagship property is known, we say so.
| # | Church | Where | Land | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Roman Catholic Church | Worldwide | 71,600,000 ha (177m acres) | Estimate |
| 2 | Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints | United States | 710,000 ha (1.75m acres) | Investigative tally, 2020 |
| 3 | Church of Sweden | Sweden | 517,000 ha | Church figures |
| 4 | Evangelical Church in Germany (parishes) | Germany | 325,000 ha | Parliamentary paper |
| 5 | Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland | Finland | 168,500 ha | Church figures |
| 6 | Church of Greece | Greece | 130,000 ha | Estimate |
| 7 | Church of Norway (Opplysningsvesenets fond) | Norway | 87,500 ha | Fund reports |
| 8 | Church of England (Church Commissioners) | England | 41,700 ha (103,000 acres) | Church figures |
| 9 | Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem | Israel and Palestine | 450 ha in central Jerusalem alone | Historical record |
| 10 | Iglesia ni Cristo | Philippines | 140 ha at Ciudad de Victoria (flagship only) | Church statements |
| 11 | Trinity Church Wall Street (Episcopal) | New York | 5.7 ha (14 acres), worth billions | Financial disclosures |
The American Empire Builder
The most aggressive land buyer in modern Christianity is not Rome. It is Salt Lake City.
An investigation by the nonprofit Truth & Transparency found that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints held 1,754,633 acres across the United States in July 2020, with a minimum market value of US$15.7 billion. The church does not publish its landholdings and that tally excludes its farms and ranches abroad.
It is the largest private landowner in Florida, with 626,600 acres held through its investment arm Farmland Reserve, built around the Deseret Ranches east of Orlando and a deal struck in 2013 for about 383,000 acres of the St Joe Company’s land, worth roughly US$565 million. It has been the biggest buyer of farmland in Nebraska in recent years and owns almost 150 acres around Temple Square in Salt Lake City, valued at no less than US$2.3 billion.
This is land bought as an investment strategy, not inherited from emperors. It explains how a church founded in 1830 now ranks second only to Rome.
The Forest Churches of the North
Scandinavia offers the clearest data, because its former state churches still answer to public scrutiny.
The Church of Sweden manages about 470,000 hectares of forest land and 47,000 hectares of farmland. It is Sweden’s fifth largest forest owner, holding 1.7 per cent of the country’s forests, and its title in some places runs back to land given by Olof Skötkonung, the first Swedish king to be baptised, in the eleventh century. How it fells those trees has become a live issue in its church elections.
In Finland, Lutheran parishes own about 168,500 hectares, of which 162,500 hectares is forest. In Norway, the Opplysningsvesenets fond, a state foundation that serves the Church of Norway, controls about 875 square kilometres of forest, farmland and parsonages through its company Allstad.
Germany’s Quiet Estate
Germany’s two big churches together own at least 830,000 hectares, according to the researcher Carsten Frerk, whose estimate is widely used because the churches themselves publish no consolidated figure. Protestant parishes alone hold about 325,000 hectares, according to a paper before the Bavarian parliament. In Berlin alone, land held by churches and religious communities has been valued at about €1.4 billion.
The Vatican’s Rent Roll
The Holy See itself is a far smaller landlord than the global Church. Its property office, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, known as APSA, manages 4,234 units in Italy and about 1,200 more in London, Paris, Geneva and Lausanne. About 92 per cent of the Italian portfolio sits in the province of Rome.
The striking figure is what that property earns. In 2023 fewer than half of APSA’s Italian units were let at market rent. More than a quarter were let at reduced rates, and almost a quarter produced no rent at all. The non paying properties are the largest, accounting for 70 per cent of the floor area.
Real estate still made APSA €44.5 million in profit in 2025. For a portfolio of this scale and location, a private landlord would expect a great deal more.
The Church of England’s Portfolio
Anglicanism’s mother church runs the most professional church endowment in the world. The Church Commissioners for England ended 2025 with a fund of £11.6 billion after an eight per cent return, its seventeenth consecutive positive year. It manages about 80,000 acres of tenanted farmland and 23,000 acres of forest, is the 13th largest landowner in the United Kingdom, and pays for about a fifth of the Church of England’s running costs.
The Orthodox Holdings
The Church of Greece is the country’s largest landowner after the state. Experts put its holdings at about 130,000 hectares, alongside more than 500 monasteries and 7,945 parishes, although estimates of its share of Greek land range from 0.5 to 1.3 per cent.
In Jerusalem, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate is the second largest landowner in Israel after the state. It owns about a third of the Old City, and the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, stands on land it owns. Its quiet sales of long leases to private investors have provoked protests from Israeli homeowners and Palestinian Christians alike.
In Russia, a 2010 law has returned hundreds of Soviet era religious buildings to the Russian Orthodox Church, but no total land figure has ever been published.
Ethiopia offers a warning from history. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church once claimed about a third of the country’s land, and scholars estimate it actually held between 10 and 20 per cent of cultivated land. In 1975 the Marxist Derg nationalised all of it.
Small Plots, Big Money
Acreage is not the only measure of power. Trinity Church Wall Street, an Episcopal parish in New York, received 215 acres of Manhattan farmland from Queen Anne in 1705. It still owns about 14 acres, mainly in Hudson Square. In 2015 eleven of its buildings were valued at US$3.55 billion in a joint venture with Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, and in 2018 Disney paid US$650 million for the right to develop one Trinity block for 99 years.
In the Philippines, Iglesia ni Cristo built Ciudad de Victoria, a 140 hectare estate north of Manila anchored by the Philippine Arena, which it bills as the world’s largest indoor arena.
Half the Flock, Almost All the Land
Catholics make up about half of the world’s Christians. Yet in our ranking, the Catholic Church accounts for 97 per cent of the land. Some of that gap reflects history: two millennia of bequests, royal grants and missions. Some reflects structure: a single communion counts as one owner, while Protestantism is split into thousands.
The Myth Check
Big numbers attract bad numbers. A claim circulating widely in India holds that the Catholic Church there owns seven crore hectares, or 70 million hectares. That would equal about 21 per cent of India’s entire territory, and almost exactly the Church’s estimated holdings across the whole planet. The figure does not survive basic arithmetic.
Real numbers are more modest and more revealing. In Poland, the state transferred about 148,000 hectares to the Catholic Church after 1989, about 65,500 hectares through a property commission and about 82,500 hectares through a separate provision of law.
What This Means for Jamaica
Jamaica has no public register of church land. The Anglican Church alone has identified about 900 plots across all 14 parishes, and in 1964 the former Church of England lands in Jamaica were transferred to the local diocese. Yet nobody can say how much of that estate is occupied by worship, schools, squatters or nothing at all.
The losses are real. The Moravian Church has confirmed that squatters occupy 435 of the 500 acres it owns at Lititz in St Elizabeth, leaving it about 65 acres. Baptist leaders have said they stopped counting their losses.
After Hurricane Melissa, more than 1,600 churches were reportedly affected, and public money has helped restore many of them. That makes a national audit of church land a reasonable public question, not an attack on faith. The Church of England and the Church of Sweden publish what they own. Jamaica’s churches could do the same.
The Lesson in the Ledger
The world’s churches are among its oldest landlords, and some of its least transparent. The best managed, in London and Stockholm, publish their holdings and earn steady returns. The least visible may be sitting on assets they have never measured.
Land outlasts congregations. The question for every church is whether it knows what it owns, and what that land is for.
Method: Figures come from church annual reports and statements, parliamentary papers, Pew Research Center, APSA and Church Commissioners filings, and documented investigations. Acres were converted at 2.471 acres per hectare. Jamaica measures 10,991 square kilometres. Where a church publishes no national total, only known holdings are shown.
Dean Jones is Director of Jamaica Homes Ltd and a Realtor.
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