The Lay Election Francis Lost EVERY YEAR of His Pontificate

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.

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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.

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