VATICAN CITY — Trying to save jobs as the pandemic pummels Vatican revenues, Pope Francis has ordered pay cuts for cardinals and other clerics, as well as nuns, who work at the Holy See.
In a decree published online Wednesday by the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Francis said that starting in April cardinals’ salaries will be reduced 10 percent. Superiors of the Holy See’s various departments – who, with few exceptions, are clerics – will be hit by 8 percent cuts, while lower-ranking priests and nuns will see 3 percent vanish from their paychecks.
In the decree he signed Tuesday, the pope noted that the Holy See’s finances have been marked by several years of deficit. Worsening those financial woes, the pope wrote, was the COVID-19 pandemic, “which has impacted negatively on all the sources of revenue of the Holy See and Vatican City State.”
The belt-tightening “has the aim of saving current job positions,” Francis wrote.
Lower-ranking lay workers at the Vatican aren’t affected by the salary reductions, but their pay raises, due every two years, are being temporarily frozen under the austerity measures. The lowest-paid lay workers will still get raise, though.
