The changing fiscal face of the USCCB
Description
As the U.S. Catholic bishops meet in Baltimore this week and prepare to elect a new president of their conference, the organization is going through a major transition in its activities.
That transition, and how the bishops decide to address it, could shine a light on the type of leaders they will choose to guide the organization through the coming years.
At the root of this are the several different functions which the USCCB takes on as an organization.
As a consortium of America’s diocesan bishops, the conference is sometimes perceived to function as something between a mega-diocese and a mini-Vatican — though in reality it has decidedly less canonical authority than either of them.
In that sense, the conference sponsors spiritual initiatives like the National Eucharistic Revival, prepares catechetical materials, approves translations of the Mass, the Liturgy of the Hours, and the Bible for use in the U.S., and it issues documents and guidance on Catholic doctrine.
Second, the conference acts as a supra-diocesan organization for administering Catholic charitable work, sponsoring a number of national collections which fund organizations such as the National Retirement Fund for Religious, Catholic Relief Services, Catholic Home Missions Appeal, Collection for the Church in Latin America, and Catholic Campaign for Human Development.
Finally, the conference functions as a clearing house for Catholic organizations which receive U.S. government contracts to provide charitable services to migrants and refugees. In recent years, this had grown to be the fiscally largest of the conference’s areas of activity, with government contracting revenue larger than all other sources of revenue for the USCCB in 2024.
But earlier this year all government contracts for the USCCB were canceled, zeroing out the largest piece of the conference budget.
While the conference is legally and ethically required to keep these three aspects of the organization separate, that significant change in overall scope and direction may weigh on the minds of bishops as they choose the conference’s new leadership.
What will a changing bishops’ conference look like?
The Pillar looks at the numbers.
Of the three areas of USCCB activity, the one which stands out most dramatically in recent years is the conference’s work on securing government contracts to provide services to refugees and migrants.
The conference does not directly provide the work to fulfill these contracts. Rather, it serves as a central administrator to apply for these contracts, which are then fulfilled by local Catholic charitable organizations.
The USCCB was among 10 agencies which partnered with the state department to help refugees in the approved for entry into the U.S. by meeting them at the airport, finding them lodging for their initial months in the U.S., providing food and clothing as needed, and helping refugee families with initial steps like registering for schools and finding medical offices.
Along with the USCCB, the additional agencies providing this work included religious organizations such as Global Refuge (formerly Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service) and World Relief (a program run by the National Association of Evangelicals) and secular ones such as the International Rescue Committee, which was founded in cooperation with Albert Einstein.
Eighty-eight percent of the money received by the USCCB to provide these services was passed on directly to the local organizations which do the work of helping to resettle refugees in individual communities, but a portion of the money is spent on USCCB administration of the program.
In February, the federal government ended the contracts with all 10 non-profit partner organizations. That fact means that while 2024 realized the USCCB’s largest revenue to support refugee and migrant programs, going forward there will seemingly be no such funding at all, at least in the current administration.
Already some USCCB staff who worked on the refugee programs have been laid off, as have staff at the local organizations which worked directly with resettled refugees. However USCCB leadership will clearly need to decide how to finish winding down the government-funded operations to support refugees and migrants and also resolve whether they will lead privately supported refugee services or simply get out of the business entirely.
The next largest part of the USCCB budget is in some ways similarly structured. Just as the USCCB acted as the central administrator for government contracts to support refugee programs that run by local Catholic organizations, so too does the conference manage a set of national collections, which bring together donations from ordinary Catholics across the country to fund specific types of programs and disburses those funds to local Catholic organizations throughout the country to do the on-the-ground work.
The USCCB collected $82.3 million via the national collections in 2024. That is slightly lower than in the prior two years, and lower than every year from 2010 to 2019.
The largest of the national collections is consistently the annual collection for the National Religious Retirement Office, which funds the care of religious in their old age.
Other consistently large collections include the ones for Catholic Relief Services, the Home Missions Appeal (which provides funding to Catholic ministry and education in parts of the U.S. where the local church does not have the resources to fully support itself), and the collections for the Church in Latin America and the Church in Eastern Europe.
One national collection which has decreased over the years is the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. The CCHD has attracted its share of controversy in recent years, and it appeared to spend down its reserves – granting more money to local organizations than it was taking in through collections – prior to its longtime head stepping down last year.
But despite the uncertainty surrounding the program, the national collection was conducted last November and will occur again this month. The total funds donated in 2024 increased by $1.5 million compared to the prior year.
While there have been proposals made in recent years to re-focus the CCHD, for now the program appears to be moving forward as before. In that sense, the leaders elected by the bishops this November may be important voices in the direction of the campaign.
What we might see as the core USCCB activities actually come out of the smallest funding category, the diocesan assessments and other donations and funding sources which allow the USSCCB to run their daily operations.
The expenses for these operations are broken down into three broad categories.
Within each of these categories, salaries and the taxes and benefits which go with them are by far the largest expense category. These are the areas in which the majority of USCCB staff work.
Just as dioceses support their operations by placing an assessment (almost like a tax) on the parishes within the diocese, the USCCB gets the majority of its operational funds by placing an assessment on dioceses.</p
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