Pope Leo XIV repeals COVID-era pay cuts to Vatican cardinals

Ishmael Adibuah By Ishmael Adibuah for EWTN News · Vatican Bureau

September 14, 2026 Ishmael Adibuah News Briefs 0 Print

Pope Leo XIV repeals COVID-era pay cuts to Vatican cardinals

A flag of Vatican City State flies outside Piazza Pio XII, the main entrance to St. Peter’s Square, on July 16, 2026. | Credit: Ishmael Adibuah/EWTN News
A flag of Vatican City State flies outside Piazza Pio XII, the main entrance to St. Peter’s Square, on July 16, 2026. | Credit: Ishmael Adibuah/EWTN News

Pope Leo XIV has officially repealed the salary cuts Pope Francis imposed on cardinals and other senior officials working in the Roman Curia.

In a decree published by the Vatican on Sept. 14, the pontiff canceled the cost-cutting measures Francis had established in 2021 to address the Vatican’s financial deficit that year, projected at $60 million.

A Vatican cardinal’s monthly stipend is about $5,768 (5,000 euros). Under those measures, the Vatican cut cardinals’ stipends by 10%.

Francis had previously described these cuts in a March 2021 decree as necessary for an “economically sustainable future” at the Vatican.

Those measures, introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, also reduced the pay of other senior officials and employees of the Holy See and Vatican City State by 8%. Clergy and religious employed by the Vatican saw their salaries reduced by 3%.

Leo stated in his motu proprio that those salary cuts “may now be set aside, in the certainty that the Institutions of the Holy See and of the Vatican City State will continue, through different means, their commitment to ensuring economic sustainability.”

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Pope Francis: The Church is called to reflect the Trinity’s goodness

June 11, 2017 CNA Daily News 0

Vatican City, Jun 11, 2017 / 09:11 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Through God’s mercy the Church can become an image of the communion and goodness of the Trinity, Pope Francis said Sunday in St. Peter’s Square.

“The Christian community, though with all its human limitations, can become a reflection of the communion of the Trinity, of its goodness and beauty,” he said Jun 11 during his Angelus address.

“But this – as Paul himself testifies – passes necessarily through the experience of the mercy of God, of his pardon.”

The Pope’s address on Trinity Sunday reflected on the “mystery of the identity of God,” which so affected St. Paul.

“God is not distant and closed in on himself,” Francis reflected, “but rather is the Life which wishes to communicate itself; he is openness; he is the Love which redeems man’s infidelity.”

God’s revelation “has come to completion in the New Testament thanks to words of Christ and to his mission of salvation,” he said.

Christ “has shown us the face of God, One in substance and Triune in Persons; God is all and only Love, in a subsisting relationship that creates, redeems, and sanctifies all: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

The Son of God showed that God first sought us, and revealed that eternal life is precisely “the immeasurable and gratuitous love of the Father that Jesus gave on the Cross, offering his life for our salvation.”

“And this love, by the action of the Holy Spirit, has irradiated a new light upon the earth and in every human heart that welcomes it.”

“May the Virgin Mary “help us to enter ever more, with our whole selves, into the trinitarian Communion, to live and bear witness to the love that gives sense to our existence,” Pope Francis concluded.

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