ROME – While Pope Francis has written once again to cardinals to warn them of financial difficulties at the Vatican, this time focusing on a “serious imbalance” in the pension fund, his own workforce is raising alarms about a different sort of shortfall – a “trust deficit” about the scope of the problem and how to fix it.
It’s been the Vatican’s worst-kept secret for some time that the pension system is in trouble. In 2020, for instance, the late Cardinal George Pell, former head of the Secretariat for the Economy, sounded an alarm that the Vatican is “slowly going broke”, citing a ballooning deficit in the pension fund. In 2022, that deficit was estimated at around $664 million just for the Holy See, rising to $1.04 billion if one includes the Vatican City State and the Vicariate of Rome.
