Leo XIV repeals the Covid salary cuts. The question is the heart, not the figure.

By a motu proprio published on 14 September 2026, Leo XIV repealed the regulation « Un futuro sostenibile » (« A Sustainable Future »), issued by Francis on 23 March 2021, which had reduced the salaries of cardinals and senior officials of the Roman Curia during the pandemic. The repeal takes effect on 1 September 2026.

The Church is not measured by her budgets. Ecclesiastical goods are not the property of those who administer them: they are the patrimony of God and of the poor, entrusted to clerics as to stewards who will render an account of them. The minister's just keep is owed, for « the labourer is worthy of his hire »; but the peril that threatens the high clergy is not want, it is avarice, which the Apostle names « the root of all evils ». The question, then, is never the amount of a salary, but the attachment of the heart.

The 2021 measure cut 10% from the salary of curial cardinals, 8% from that of heads and secretaries of dicasteries, and applied a general 3% reduction to clerical and religious employees. It also froze the biennial seniority increases of all serving staff, but, for lay employees, only from the fourth grade upward, sparing the lowest salaries. Francis had justified it by the deficit aggravated by the pandemic, as a review of expenditure meant to avoid harsher measures, such as the dismissal of employees, especially lay men and women who are fathers or mothers of families. One article of it had already been repealed on 16 June 2025.

The new text, « having heard the competent opinion of the Secretariat for the Economy », lifts the rest: the salaries are restored, while the effects produced during the period in which it was in force, including the freeze on the acquisition of seniority grades, remain definitively acquired. Leo XIV writes that the reductions « were also necessary to meet the exceptional challenge posed by the pandemic », and that « they can now be overcome, in the certainty that the institutions of the Holy See and of the Vatican City State will continue, by different means, their commitment to guaranteeing economic sustainability ».

To render the minister his due is no fault; to cling to it would be. Tradition does not judge the figure, it judges the heart that receives it.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the Seventh Commandment, concerning the goods of others and the vice of avarice; First Epistle of Saint Paul to Timothy, VI, 8-10 (« the desire of money is the root of all evils »); Gospel according to Saint Luke, X, 7 (« the labourer is worthy of his hire »).