Pope Leo XIV Faces Financial Headache as New Catholic Church Leader

Miami Herald

09-05-2025

Pope Leo XIV, the first person from the United States to lead the Catholic Church, is taking on a financial headache in his new position.
White smoke billowed from the Vatican at about 6 p.m. on Thursday as the papal conclave made its decision about who should become the leader of the Catholic Church.
They elected Cardinal Robert Prevost of Chicago as the new pope. He instantly became perhaps the most recognizable and influential living religious figure alive, holding considerable sway over the world's 1.4 billion Catholics.
Despite the vast reach and influence of the church, the Vatican has faced financial challenges in recent years. The task will now fall to Leo XIV, whose leadership at the Vatican began immediately after his election to succeed Pope Francis, who died on April 21.
Francis in February established a new commission to promote donations to the Catholic Church, which has been in a budget deficit in recent years. In 2023, the Church was operating with a $90 million deficit, reported Crux, an online news organization.
It is hard to know the full extent of the deficit challenges because of its privacy, Michele Dillon, dean of the University of New Hampshire's College of Liberal Arts, told Newsweek.
"The Bank's historical and continued lack of transparency—even in dealing with the pope and senior Vatican officials—adds to the accounting challenge," Dillon said.
The Church has a plethora of expenses, according to Dillon, including real estate ranging from large churches to basilicas, many of which do not have an entrance charge despite "costly operational expenses," she said.
Much of the Church's growth is in less wealthy regions, and its affluent base in Europe and the United States is "not sufficiently robust to meet the multiple needs of the universal church," she said.
"The annual Peter's Pence collection held across the globe is running a deficit. The Vatican reports that it yielded 52 million Euros in 2023—well over one-quarter of it from collections at U.S. parishes—but the expenses that year were 109.4 million euros. This sort of deficit is simply not sustainable," she said.
The church is facing financial concerns on multiple fronts, Erin Walsh, a professor focusing on Christianity at the University of Chicago, told Newsweek. These include declining tourism after the COVID-19 pandemic, litigation surrounding the sexual abuse scandal that has hit the church in recent decades and the rising cost of supporting aging clerics, she said.
The Church's pension fund is another key issue that poses a financial challenge moving forward.
Kevin Ahern, professor of religious studies at Manhattan University, told Newsweek the Vatican has, for more than a century, "wrestled with how to fund a small country with a global diplomatic outreach." It also has a commitment to charitable works for the poor, without a steady income stream, he said.
"It also has to cover the costs and pensions of employees and basic maintenance. The state of the pension fund is deeply concerning and is an issue of justice to the employees who depend on it," he said.
Some assets belonging to the Catholic Church, such as its "priceless art," cannot be valued nor used to pay for the pension funds, according to Ahern.
Popes over the past century have directed much of the cash assets of the Vatican toward humanitarian causes, especially after the first and second world wars, and when they have organized appeals from local parishes, it's usually for the pope's charitable works. There is no, for example, "pope tax" that bishops or parishes have to pay.
Financing isn't a new issue. During the Middle Ages, some popes tried to finance the church by selling "indulgences," which granted remission of a sin. But the practice of selling indulgences was ended by Pope Pius V in 1567.
"Since the First World War, popes have looked to powerful, wealthy groups, like the Knights of Columbus or Opus Dei, to fund some projects, including renovations of buildings, and in recent decades, a Papal Foundation was set up in the United States, but the situation remains precarious," Ahern said.
Having an American pope may "tighten the ship somewhat" in terms of donations from organizations, even if he may be "out of sync" with some donors, Daniel Rober, chair of Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University, told Newsweek. Leo XIV, he noted, was elected "in part due to his reputation as a good manager."
"Many of these larger donors have particular ideas about the church—often quite conservative—that they would like to be heard and implemented. Some of them before this conclave indicated they would be willing to donate 'with the right pope,'" he said.
Leo XIV will need to "find smart ways to implement effective reforms at the Bank," Dillon said. This will be a "challenging task," in part because Vatican offices including the bank are "mired in a culture of secrecy," according to Dillon.
"Francis tried to implement structural, procedural and oversight changes in the Bank's practices, and brought in/appointed several successive external financial experts as executives, but almost each one left amid controversy and the emergence of new scandals," she said.
One scandal involved Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, who in 2023 was found guilty of fraud and embezzlement.
Ahern noted that Francis faced "opposition and even threats from inside the bureaucracy" when he tried to address the financial concerns.
"An additional challenge that Francis faced in reorienting the church towards the poor and critiquing the global economy is that some wealthy donors in the United States and Europe felt alienated from his priorities," he said. "Pope Leo will likely be looking to rebuild some of those relationships. This will not be easy as he will likely want to keep the Church's prophetic stance on economic justice, migration and ecological care."
Walsh said a challenge in managing the finances of the Church is that its financial needs differ from country to country. In North America, rising costs may be dealing with the age of clerics, but in other parts of the world, the Church is eyeing churches and schools in areas that don't already have that infrastructure in place.
Pope Leo XIV, in remarks on Thursday: "We have to seek together to be a missionary church, a church that builds bridges and dialogue, always ready to accept, like this great piazza, with its arms, we have to show our charity, presence and dialogue with love."
Daniel Rober, chair of Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University, told Newsweek:"The Vatican faces significant debts and threats to its pension fund. This is the result of ongoing mismanagement following three Popes who have not been intensely focused on this particular matter [and particularly over the last three decades have been men in at least their mid-70s and thus often not able to focus on such details with so much else to do]."
The new pope must be able to speak well to donors to solicit more donations and encourage giving to the Church, Walsh said.
"Even if it is this centralized institution, I think some of these questions really have to do with how local and smaller parts of this institution are managed and how fundraising goes for them," she said. "It's a very complex problem with how these smaller parts are integrated and are supporting one another."
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