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27-10-2024
VATICAN CITY: The Vatican is cutting the already shrinking pay packages of cardinals who head the Catholic Church’s top offices in Rome by about 10% or 500 euros ($540) a month as the pope pursues a “zero deficit” agenda of greater thrift.
The cardinals will no longer receive two monthly allowances that are often used to defray the cost of hiring personal secretaries, said a note written by Maximino Caballero Ledo, a Spanish layman who heads the Vatican’s finance ministry.
The Vatican press office did not respond to a request for comment, but a senior Vatican official provided the letter to media.
Caballero said in the letter, dated Oct. 18, that he was acting at Pope Francis’ request and that the cuts would go into effect on Nov. 1.
They affect only cardinals who serve as heads of the Vatican’s various departments in Rome: about 20 of the world’s more than 230 “princes of the Church”.
Cardinals in Rome receive a monthly stipend believed to be around 4,000 to 5,000 euros ($4,300 to $5,400), according to Italian media reports. The scrapped allowances are estimated at around 500 euros.
Francis has recently prioritized cutting Vatican spending.
He wrote an unusual letter last month to all the world’s cardinals, asking them to pursue a “zero deficit” agenda to help improve the Vatican’s economic standing and promote “a spirit of essentiality, avoiding the superfluous and selecting our priorities well”.
Francis previously ordered a 10% pay cut for cardinals in Rome in March 2021, as the Vatican reeled from the impact of reduced tourism during the coronavirus pandemic. He also began to eliminate subsidized rents for cardinals and other top Vatican officials in 2023.
The headquarters of the Church comprises two entities, the internationally recognized sovereign entity of the Holy See and the Vatican, a 108-acre city-state surrounded by Rome.
They maintain separate budgets, and Vatican City income, including from the popular Vatican Museums, has often been used to plug deficits in the Holy See’s budget.
Late last month, the Vatican announced the coronavirus pandemic had forced Pope Francis to postpone an annual fund raising campaign among Catholics worldwide to help him carry out his ministry.
The delay of “Peter’s Pence” by more than three months to the first weekend in October has come at a particularly bad time, as other revenues, notably from the Vatican Museums, slow to a trickle.
The pandemic has wreaked havoc with the Vatican’s finances, forcing it to dip into reserve funds and implement some of the toughest cost control measures ever in the tiny city-state.
Against this bleak backdrop, top Vatican administrators held an emergency meeting in late March. They ordered a freeze on promotions and hiring and a ban on overtime, travel and large events.
An internal memo seen by Reuters said the decisions, effective for the rest of the year, were taken “to mitigate, at least in the short-term, the grave economic impact … and to avoid any further immediate drastic measures.”
A follow-up letter in April told department heads that, in keeping with the pope’s policy, they could not fire people.
The Peter’s pence fund, which brings in an estimated $50-65 million yearly, aims to help the pope’s activities as head of the 1.3 billion-member Church and support charitable projects in the world’s neediest areas. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
