Pope Leo XIV Turns 71, Giving Vatican Employees a Pay-Cut Reversal
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV celebrated his 71st birthday on Monday, but it was Vatican employees who received the gift.
The Vatican published a papal decree repealing the 2021 salary cuts that Pope Francis had imposed on many employees as part of the Holy See’s COVID-19 cost-saving measures. The cuts had been deeply unpopular inside the Vatican, where they touched cardinals, office heads, lower-ranking priests and nuns, and senior lay staff. For employees, the reversal may ease years of resentment over austerity, though the Holy See still faces long-term fiscal pressures.
In the decree, Leo said the salary-cutting measures “can now be overcome, in the certainty that the institutions of the Holy See and the Vatican City State will continue, through various means, their commitment to ensuring economic sustainability.”
Under Francis, cardinals had their pay reduced by 10%, while office heads and lower-ranking priests and nuns faced smaller percentage cuts. Biennial pay raises were frozen for senior lay employees, though lower-ranking lay employees continued to receive raises. Francis argued at the time that the reductions were necessary to save jobs, as the Holy See confronted a structural deficit then estimated at around 70 million euros and a 1 billion euro ($1.14 billion) pension fund shortfall.
The pandemic closed the Vatican Museums for months, depriving the Holy See of one of its main sources of revenue. The Vatican’s finances also took hits from investment and currency fluctuations.
Leo, a mathematics major and former superior general of his Augustinian religious order, is known as a pope comfortable with financial matters and balance sheets. The first American pontiff, he has moved quickly to put his own stamp on Vatican governance. His brother, John Prevost, recently told Italian broadcaster Mediaset that the pope had helped him with a question about filing his taxes.
Soon after his election, Leo said the Vatican’s financial situation was not nearly as dire as he had expected and credited Francis with making important reforms. Still, he has spent much of his early pontificate amending or outright reversing some of Francis’s financial decisions, a pattern that continued with Monday’s decrees.
In a second decree published Monday, Leo canceled Francis’s plans to move some of the Vatican’s secret archives and library holdings out of Vatican City and onto the grounds of a pontifical university across town. Francis had approved the move because the collections were outgrowing their current storage spaces, including a vast underground bunker.
Leo said “unprecedented opportunities have arisen to create new spaces” within Vatican City itself. He ordered the construction of a new building on a current parking lot to house the material, which includes ancient manuscripts and entire archival collections from past popes, religious congregations and benefactors.
Leo visited the Vatican Apostolic Library on Monday and noted that it was especially fitting to mark his birthday with its staff because his mother was a librarian.
“I’d just like to say that God, in His providence — and sometimes with a touch of humor — always reminds us that he is with us,” Leo told the staff. “Many of you may not know that my mother was a librarian, and today I’m here on my birthday specifically to say hello to all of you.”
The library and archive are open to scholars and researchers for study. A small exhibition space in the library is also open weekly to the general public, with reservations and pre-purchased tickets.
Leo was at the library Monday to inaugurate an exhibition about water, the first installment in a new five-year cycle titled “Catastrophe and Marvel.” It features a giant design of a wave attached by scaffolding to the library’s facade by French artist JR.
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