Founded by Conrad Hilton, the hotel magnate, the Hilton Foundation is one of the biggest financial backers of Catholic sisters’ work around the world, and has given roughly $28.5 million to Vatican-led initiatives, including Vatican departments, since 2020.
Francis saw donors as vital partners. He looked to them not only to fund the causes dear to him but also to plug the Vatican’s creaky finances. In February, while the pope was recovering from a near-death bout of double pneumonia, he created the Commissio de Donationibus pro Sancta Sede, a committee to fund-raise directly for the curia, or the Vatican’s governing hierarchy, and to shore up its many budget shortfalls. Francis’ initiative was bold: He was essentially betting that donors would be happy to openly fund church bureaucracy as well as the Roman Catholic Church’s far-flung missions around the world.
Such an ask would have been an extremely tough sell when the Francis papacy began.
Back then, the church’s financial reputation was in tatters. Accounting intrigue and scandal at the Vatican Bank loomed over the last conclave. In 2013, just before Francis was elected pope, Italian banking authorities had shut off most of the A.T.M.s in the Vatican and blocked credit card transactions at the Vatican Museum, until the microstate could prove it was meeting international anti- money-laundering standards. Decades of mismanagement and corruption scandals had taken their toll.
The church seemed to need a great business mind as much as it needed a towering theologian.
To donors’ relief, Francis modernized the Vatican’s financial oversight. A year into his papacy, he created an auditor general and beefed up internal anti-corruption controls. He also introduced some financial transparency (though it’s far from business-world standards) and brought in outside auditors, such as KPMG and EY, to help keep a lid on costs and make the Holy See’s curia run more professionally.
He also worked more closely with the church’s major donors, and their influence on the church grew.
At the same time, the Vatican hosted a series of impact-investing summits to bring more Wall Street money to causes close to Francis, many of the same ones that donors often focus on. The pope became a featured speaker at major international events, addressing in 2023 the Clinton Global Initiative.