And yet, as more convents are shut and parishes become extinct, the Church’s aging sisters are left without pensions, Social Security benefits or any viable means of financial support.
The Church’s declining influence in America, however, hasn’t had a disastrous impact on its overall financial holdings. A recent article in Vice asserted, “By 2005, the Catholic Church had spent $1 billion on legal fees and settlements stemming from priests sexually abusing children. Yet Church leaders have allocated no funds to take care of elderly sisters, and while priests’ retirement funds are covered by the Church, the sisters have no such safety net.”
Despite the mounting costs incurred defending priests, clergy and parishes in a barrage of pedophilia claims and sexual assault cases, the Roman Catholic Church is still very rich, and its true worth hovers well beyond $8 billion in cash and equities – and that’s without factoring in its real estate holdings and other assets, including its trusts and endowments.
The Catholic hierarchy is unequivocally composed of men who both ignore and shut out women by relegating them to the status of caretakers, who are indeed more subservient to man than they are to God. According to an article in the Detroit Free Press,
“The large number of Catholic sisters who once staffed schools are now in retirement and struggling to cope with healthcare costs and underfunded pensions.”
During their working careers, Roman Catholic Nuns worked for reduced wages, if they were compensated at all. Many sisters did not receive any salary. In order to draw benefits from the American Social Security system, a person has to have paid into the system by having worked at least 10 years. Since many working nuns received no salary, they are not eligible to receive Social Security benefits. Funding the retirement of aging nuns is made through private donations and nonprofit organizations.
One group that provides for the costs of retirement for aging sisters is the national Retirement Fund for Religious. Each year, through parish churches, Catholics are asked to contribute to the fund. The donations are strictly voluntary and are used to help pay for the basic needs of elderly nuns, as well as brothers and priests who have lost their parish and are not affiliated with any archdiocese.
Many retired nuns are forced to apply for Medicaid, thus swelling the ranks of those who draw from the welfare system. This is especially ironic when the Roman Catholic Church is not required to pay the requisite income taxes or property taxes that feed the coffers for the U.S. federal and state government social welfare infrastructure.
While the cost of living and healthcare continues to rise, the aging sisters are not taken care of by the Church. Instead, private funding is sought from members of individual Catholic churches. For example, Catholic churchgoers in Michigan
contributed more than $1.5 million to the Retirement Fund for Religious last year, according to the fund’s annual report. The national Retirement Fund for Religious collected $27 million in 2012 and distributed $23 million to 440 religious communities across the U.S., mostly congregations of elderly Catholic sisters.”
It is important to note that many religious communities do their own fund-raising to help pay for expenses and are eligible to apply for the grants. Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, noted that the diocese gives $1 million a year to a national retirement fund. "It's a problem for the orders to which the Church is responding," he said.
A donation of $1 million a year is essentially like putting a Band-Aid on a dead person. The national retirement fund was started in 1988 and was only expected to last 10 years, but the need has increased. In 2006, its mission was renewed for a third, 10-year period. The Catholic News “reported that religious orders had invested $9.1 billion to cover retirement expenses, but were carrying a retirement liability of nearly double that amount.”
Sister Janice Bader, executive director of the National Religious Retirement Office (NRRO), said “a recent actuarial study showed that the unfunded need currently exceeds $4 billion. That amount is down from more than $8 billion in a similar study done in 2004. The Retirement Fund for Religious, the largest of several fundraising appeals for priests, sisters and brothers in religious communities, raises an average of $28 million annually.”
Private funds that have been set up to support the aging religious workers include the Retirement Fund for Religious, the Foundation for Religious Retirement and Support Our Aging Religious (SOAR), a Washington, D.C.-based group started by laypeople in 1986.