This is a new one on me, to be honest. I wasn’t aware Cardinals got a salary, as such, and certainly not anything this generous. If this Gript thing doesn’t work out, that’s my next career move, for sure:
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has ordered cardinals to take a 10 percent pay cut and reduced the salaries of most other clerics working in the Vatican in order to save jobs of employees as the coronavirus pandemic has hit the Holy See’s income.
The Vatican said on Wednesday that Francis issued a decree introducing proportional cuts starting on April 1. A spokesman said most lay employees would not be affected by the cuts.
Francis, 84, and from a working class family, has often insisted he does not want to fire people in difficult economic times, even as the Vatican continues to run up deficits.
Cardinals who work at the Vatican and live there or in Rome are believed to get salaries of about 4,000 to 5,000 euros ($4,730 to $5,915) a month, and many live in large apartments at well below market rents.
The Vatican City doesn’t have an income tax, either. So that is the functional equivalent of earning about €110,000 per year, if you lived in Dublin. And the rent is cheaper, too.
Not a bad gig.
Anyway, the fact that the Church’s income has fallen is hardly a surprise. No masses is not the default state of affairs outside of Ireland, but even though churches are open in most countries, attendances will surely have suffered over the past year as people stay away, either out of a sense of duty, or of fear.
And of course, the Vatican will have been hit hard itself, as an institution. It’s one of the worlds premier attractions for tourists and pilgrims alike, with entry fees for the various basilicas, churches, and art galleries being a cash cow. Visitor levels will have absolutely fallen off a cliff in the past year, and that will have had an impact on income, too.
And not every Vatican employee is a Cardinal, or a Bishop, of course. The institution undoubtedly employs thousands of ordinary lay people as cleaners, cooks, security personnel, and administrative staff. Those people will mainly live in Rome, and have taxes to pay, and higher living expenses than the Cardinals. If you’re the world’s largest church, and you have to reduce expenditure, then it would be a horrendously bad move from a PR standpoint not to chop away some of the allowance for the Princes of the Church before you make any moves in relation to the ordinary staff. It’s not just vatican workers, either, who need to be prioritised. Here in Ireland, for example, many parishes, and parish priests, are badly struggling from the reduction in income as a result of closed, or empty, churches. Prioritising those on the ground, rather than upper management, is the right thing to do.
It is worth wondering, too, whether these salaries will ever be restored. Francis is not always the most popular Pope with traditionalist catholics, because of a perceived ambiguity in his attitudes to traditional church teaching on matters of life and death and sexuality. But to his credit, he has always seemed to live a simple enough life himself and lived up to his own (occasionally painfully idealistic) views about economics.
Indeed, it’s worth wondering whether a Church where senior cardinals live in Vatican apartments and receive very generous allowances can truly be in touch with those it is sworn to help, and defend. The Pandemic may have given the Pope an excuse to do something he – and his predecessors – should have done a long time ago.