Citing serious imbalance, Pope names Cardinal Farrell to head Vatican pension fund

November 21, 2024

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CWN Editor's Note: Calling attention to “a serious prospective imbalance” in the Vatican’s pension fund, and the need for “urgent structural measures” to remedy the problem, Pope Francis has appointed Cardinal Kevin Farrell as the sole administrator of the fund.

In a November 21 letter to the College of Cardinals and the prefects of the Roman Curia, the Pope said that proper funding for pensions had long been a matter of concern, but recent studies have underlined the urgency of the problem, and reforms “can no longer be postponed.”

Putting the pension fund on a sustainable basis will involve tough decisions ‘that will require particular sensitivity, generosity and willingness to sacrifice on the part of all,” the Pope warned. He asked the prelates for “special cooperation in facilitating this new and inescapable path of change.”

Pope Francis has given Cardinal Farrell, the prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life, a steadily more important role in handling Vatican financial affairs. In 2019 the Pontiff appointed him as the camerlengo, the official who supervises the material goods of the Holy See during a papal interregnum. In 2020 he was named president of the Pontifical Commission on Confidential Matters, and in 2022 he became the president of the Pontifical Commission on Investments.

Born in Ireland, the future cardinal was ordained as a priest of the Legionaires of Christ in 1978. In 1984 he left the Legionaires to become a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, where he rose to become vicar general, serving under then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. He was named Bishop of Dallas in 2007, then appointed to his current post in the Roman Curia by Pope Francis in 2016, and raised to the College of Cardinals soon thereafter.

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