There is a vote that the Church holds every year in every parish on the planet—universal, voluntary, anonymous and immune to polling, and for that very reason impossible to rig: it is called the Peter’s Pence, it is placed in the collection basket on the Sunday closest to the feast of the Apostles, and it does not measure orthodoxy, Mass attendance or opinions about the latest synod, but something more basic and harder to fake—how many people love the Pope enough to send him money. It was Benedict XVI who gave the canonical definition in 2006: the most typical expression of the participation of all the faithful in the initiatives of the Bishop of Rome, a gesture whose value is above all symbolic, a sign of communion with the Pope. Let us take him at his word. If the Peter’s Pence is the sign of the faithful’s affective communion with Peter, then its balance sheets are not accounting: they are an electrocardiogram. And the electrocardiogram of Francis’s pontificate traces, year after year, with a constancy no accident can explain, the descending line of a loss of love.
The numbers first, because they are stubborn. Francis inherited in 2013 a collection of seventy-eight million dollars, swollen by the honeymoon every conclave grants the newly elected. Twelve years later, his last complete fiscal year closed with fifty-eight and a half million euros in donations, and the first under Leo XIV with fifty-four and a half. In nominal currency, a quarter less; adjusted for cumulative inflation, nearly forty percent less. But the devastating datum is not the endpoint but the shape of the curve: the prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy himself, the Jesuit Guerrero Alves, admitted that collections fell twenty-three percent between 2015 and 2019. Keep the dates. Before the pandemic, which closed the churches. Before October 2019, when the Sloane Avenue mansion scandal broke. The collapse precedes all its alibis. When the excuses arrived, the hemorrhage had already been open for four years; what the virus and the scandal did was finish off a donor who was already leaving.
Here it is worth clearing up the misunderstanding into which almost all the press falls, including the press that claims to be critical: the problem of the Peter’s Pence under Francis was not one of management. There was mismanagement, certainly, and a criminal trial, and a cardinal convicted at first instance, and even the posthumous humiliation of seeing the entire trial annulled in 2026 because the rescripts with which Francis himself had authorized the investigation turned out to be legally invalid. But all of that is epiphenomenon. Financial scandals do not kill a collection whose foundation is affection; at most they wound it, and affection heals the wound. The proof lies in the previous pontificate. Benedict XVI had to deal with Regensburg, the Williamson case, Vatileaks and the fiercest media campaign anyone can remember against a pope over the abuse issue, all against the backdrop of a global financial crisis; and in 2009, right in the eye of that hurricane, the Peter’s Pence reached eighty-two and a half million dollars, its ordinary record. His people, when the world was booing him, closed ranks and emptied their wallets. That is the behavior of a people that loves its father: blows from outside tighten the bond inside.
With Francis the inversion was perfect, and in that inversion lies the whole thesis. Never has a pope enjoyed better press: Time and Rolling Stone covers, fawning editorials, the unanimous applause of chancelleries, NGOs and progressive columnists who had not set foot in a church in decades and had no intention of starting. And never has the collection of papal affection fallen so much and so steadily. The paradox dissolves as soon as one looks at who votes in this plebiscite. The New York Times editorialist does not vote, nor does the world leader who posed for photographs with him: the lady at the twelve o’clock Mass votes, the couple who fill the parish envelope, the American Catholic of regular Sunday practice who for a century has sustained a quarter of the collection. In other words, exactly the kind of human being this pontificate turned into its favorite rhetorical target: the rigid, the nostalgic, the obsessed with doctrine, the one admonished from Santa Marta with a regularity that makes citations unnecessary because any reader remembers them. For twelve years Francis cultivated the applause of those who do not give and the reproach of those who did give, and then the balance sheets did their work with the coldness of things that do not read newspapers. The praise of those outside does not register in the collection basket. The disaffection of those inside does.
Let us grant the defense counsel his two pleas, which exist and are not trivial. First, secularization: religious practice is declining throughout the West and with it every collection. True, but insufficient: a twenty-three percent drop in four years far exceeds the pace of underlying sociological erosion, and above all that same secularization was already operating under Benedict without preventing his record highs. Second, the London scandal poisoned confidence in the destination of the money. Also true, and also insufficient, because it arrives too late to explain the fall and because a robust affective bond cushions scandals instead of amplifying them: the donor who loves forgives; the disaffected donor uses the scandal as the confirmation he was waiting for to do what he already wanted to do. That in 2022 the Holy See had to dress up the balance sheet by selling real estate—including the very building of the sin—to disguise the fact that real donations barely reached forty-three million says less about accounting engineering than about the drought that made it necessary. And the mirage of 2024, that final rebound to fifty-eight million that some panegyrist will want to read as a last-minute reconciliation, deflates when one looks at the breakdown: France contributed eight million that year, six times its usual figure, only to return the following year to its usual one million plus; everything points to an extraordinary testamentary bequest, not to a people returning.
What Leo XIV therefore receives is not a treasury problem, which can be fixed with auditors, but a love problem, which cannot be fixed quickly with anything. For twelve years, the only clean poll the Church possesses asked Catholics around the world whether they felt united to the Pope to the point of supporting him with their money, and for twelve years a growing portion of them answered no with the only language that admits no rhetoric: the empty envelope. Much has been written about Francis’s magisterium, about his reforms, his gestures and his silences. His faithful also wrote theirs, every 29 June, in the most sincere currency that exists. Only that magisterium was not collected by Vatican News: it was collected, year after year, in the revenue column.