Costs down but no ‘Leo bounce’: Peter’s Pence sees fall in revenue and expenses

The fund continues to operate a deficit, though significantly reduced from previous years.

Peter’s Pence, the annual global collection to support the ministry of the Holy Father, reported a drop in both revenue and expenses for the 2025 financial year in its annual disclosure.

Image Credit: Peter’s Pence

The annual report noted that the fund continues to operate a deficit, though this was significantly reduced from previous years.

According to the annual statement, income to the fund totaled 57.6 million euros in 2025, with expenses running to 59.8 million.

This represented a modest drop compared to 2024, when the collection netted revenue of 58 million euros, but a sizable reduction in expenses — down from 75.4 million euros the previous year.

Contributions from dioceses around the world, where the annual collection is undertaken on the Feast of St. Peter and Paul, remained the single largest source of income to the fund, but fell in terms of revenue while rising as a share of total income at 34.7m euros (63% of revenue), compared to 39.8m euros (59%) in 2024.

Individual donations to the collection made up only 10% of returns in 2025, totalling 5.4m euros, compared to the much more robust collection of nearly 9m euros the previous year, making up 16% of revenue to the fund in 2024.

While hopes of a broad “new pope bounce” following the election of Pope Leo XIV in April last year did not materialize, the election of the first American to the see of Peter did have some effect: the United States remained the single largest source of donations by country, rising by both total donations and percentage of revenue compared to last year: 14.2m euros and 26.1% of revenue vs. 13.7m euros and 25.2% of revenue in 2024.

The drop in revenue for last year could be part of the reason Pope Leo acted to abolish a dedicated Vatican fundraising committee created by Pope Francis at the beginning of last year.

In September last year, Leo formally suppressed the Commissio de donationibus pro Sancta Sede, or Commission of Donations for the Holy See, which sought to raise much-needed funds for the Vatican.

The commission, of which Vatican financial officials were quietly critical as ineffective and unfit for purpose, was replaced by Leo with a working group “to formulate proposals regarding the general issue of fundraising for the Holy See, along with the definition of an appropriate structure.”

The most dramatic change to Peter’s Pence, year over year for the fund, came in the amount of money disbursed for different works.

While Peter’s Pence allocated the same amount for charitable projects and priorities of the Holy Father in 2025 as 2024 (13.3m euros), the fund slashed its contribution to the Vatican’s curial departmental and operations budget by 20m euros — 61.2m down to 41.2m euros in 2025. This drop was mirrored in the percentage of the total papal budget, which includes the curia, covered by Peter’s Pence — 17% in 2024, down to 10% in 2025.

The effects of that drop in contribution to the Holy See’s general operating budget are likely to have significant impact on the curial finances which, as recently as last year, were touting a turnaround in fortune.

A budget statement released by the Vatican in November 2025 for the previous financial year reported that the Vatican’s structural budget deficit was almost halved between 2023 and 2024, dropping from 83.5 million euros to less than 44.5 million. External donations, financial investment performance, and operational income generation were all up over the same period.

According to the budget statement, despite years of cost-cutting measures, operational costs still grew by nearly 40 million euros from 2023 to 2024. According to the report, “2024 could be a turning point if [emphasis original], after years of stable or growing operating deficit, the Holy See [sees] the reduction of its operating deficit in the coming years.”

However, even amid the headline good news of shrinking deficit, the 2024 budget statement was greeted with caution in some quarters, while some questioned if the financial turnaround was “more mirage than miracle” given that the budget gap of tens of millions of euros was filled by a significant one-off realization of capital gains through the sell-off of investments, the proceeds of which appeared to have gone to shoring up the Vatican bottom line, not into reinvestment.

A similar one-off realization of gains through the sale of stable assets and investments in 2023 triggered abnormally large returns for the Peter’s Pence fund in that year, though the increased revenue was not sustained in subsequent years.

And Vatican financial officials have privately warned that APSA, the Holy See’s asset manager, newly re-delegated by Leo last year to handle curial investments, remains unreformed in its processes and structures and its profit statements unexplained and unreliable.

Since being elected pope, Leo has sounded a public note of cautious optimism regarding Vatican finances, saying that while reforms need to continue he does not “lose sleep” over the crucial budget deficit.