PHILADELPHIA (CNS) -- The ministries and services of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia contribute an estimated $4.2 billion to the Southeastern Pennsylvania economy, a study has found.

The effects result from services provided in education, health care, social and nutritional services and what the authors called the parish halo, the direct spending by the 217 archdiocesan parishes and intangibles such as the use of parish facilities and the cost of obtaining those service elsewhere.

The report, "How Catholic Places Serve Civic Purposes: The Archdiocese of Philadelphia's Economic 'Halo Effects,'" was written by Joseph P. Tierney, executive director of the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program at the University of Pennsylvania-based Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture and the Program for Research on Religious and Urban Civil Society.

In comments as the report was released, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said the Catholic contribution to civic life is effective because it is never simply humanitarian.

"Rather, it's a very concrete and particular expression of our faith. We offer our help to persons in need without strings attached, but always with a deeper religious purpose," he said.

By far the largest component in the report is education, which accounted for $2.67 billion in the region. The total includes the costs incurred by the 10 Catholic colleges and universities in the archdiocese, with a total of $1.39 billion per year.

Health care services, which totaled $1.12 billion, were drawn mostly from the operating expenses of the six Catholic hospitals and health care systems located in Southeastern Pennsylvania but not owned by the Philadelphia Archdiocese. The report noted these providers served 833,901 patients in the past year.

Catholic social services provided by the archdiocese amounted to $122 million. Added to the amount was the $20 million of Nutritional Development Services, which provides 4 million meals to 37,000 children in 92 schools and another 2.8 million meals to children in day care programs, summer feeding programs and after school programs.

Adding it all up, Tierney calculates the archdiocese contributes $4,196,183,153 of economic impact on the region. Is the estimate too high? Quite the opposite, Tierney believes, because it does not include a number of other Catholic-based service programs that are not under archdiocesan auspices.

In comparison, the $4.2 billion Catholic Church contribution to the local economy is slightly larger than the City of Philadelphia's general fund budget of $4 billion, according to Tierney's report.

Archbishop Chaput said the church's ministries are not a form of "proselytism dressed up as charity."

Such an approach to social service would be "simply a form of coercion (that) would demean the people we're trying to serve" by robbing them of their freedom, he said.

"But our education and social welfare ministries do very much exist to witness to the mercy of Jesus Christ and to demonstrate our love for God," he said. "They're statements of what we believe, incarnated through our actions. As a result, no Catholic, social service or education effort is effectively pursued or sustained without a strong Catholic identity and religious sense of mission."

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Baldwin writes for CatholicPhilly.com, the news website of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.