> Why is the catholic church panhandling in this way? Surely they can afford to do it themselves.

Pretty much all of the Catholic Church's money comes from passing the hat in one form of another, and its absolutely normal for a new initiative by a Catholic institution to be accompanied by an effort to seek direct donations to support that particular initiative.

>Why is the catholic church panhandling in this way? Surely they can afford to do it themselves.

For the same reason funded startup's use crowd funding. It demonstrates that this is something a lot of people care about and builds community buy-in around a cause. The people that run this digitization program at the vatican have bosses too and they need to justify that their project matters and deserves more time and attention.

It's unlikely they'll "just let them rot away", but I'd imagine "document preservation" is far from the highest thing on Rome's list of financial priorities. So if you want something new and exciting done, they need to find cash from somewhere - asking those interested in the documents seems a reasonable way to do that.

> Surely they can afford to do it themselves.

How do you think they got that way? Institutionalized panhandling.

This is how the church does everything. They never use their resources (other than personnel) to do things, instead they rely on donations and keep their money in their own pockets.

The Church is a body of people. The people of the Church donate money towards its purposes - the preservation of manuscripts isn't a main focus of the Church and is something the support of which isn't confined to Christians (or in this instance Catholics, who may or may not be Christians!).

In the same way that you might donate to a soup kitchen run by a Church fellowship, because the money goes to feeding hungry people, you might donate to manuscript preservation.

That people in the Church donate their time and money towards such causes and ask for other people to donate their money doesn't seem wrong.