In Pope Francis’s native Argentina, the usual financial challenges faced by the Catholic Church around the world are being compounded by a historic decision by the country’s bishops to reject the stipends the national government has been paying to Catholic clergy and seminarians since 1979.
The decision to stop accepting the stipends was made by the Argentine bishops’ conference in 2018, following decades of debate, and announced that the withdrawal was complete as of Dec. 31.
The decision to stop taking the stipends does not mean that the Church in Argentina has renounced all state support, as Catholic schools continue to receive state subsidies and various church-sponsored charitable and humanitarian programs, such as residences for recovering drug addicts, also continue to receive public support.
While the amount involved in this stipends was largely nominal, amounting to roughly $70 a month after being eroded by years of hyper-inflation without adjustments and contributing less than ten percent to the Church’s annual budget, the symbolism of the payments nevertheless was always a source of controversy.
Sociologist Juan Cruz Esquivel, an expert in the relations between church and state in Argentina, said it was the late Archbishop Carmelo Giaquinta of Resistencia who first argued the bishops should renounce the stipend in 1996, and that momentum to do built gradually in the years since, with some prelates deciding to waive their personal payments even before the conference made a collective decision.
Father Maximo Jurcinovic, a communications official for the bishops’ conference in Argentina, said that most prelates in the country had used the stipends for pastoral purposes, such as transportation to church venues, rather than supplementing their own income. He said the decision to spurn those payments marks an important turning point for Argentine Catholicism.
“It’s about understanding that the Church must be funded by its own members,” he said.