I. Up First: Bankruptcy’s Impact on Transparency and Accountability
II. News and Noteworthy:
- Combatting a Closed-Door Leadership Culture
- National Catholic Reporter Survey Shows Catholic College Students Highly Engaged
- Teens Gather for Historic Digital Encounter with Pope Leo
- Vatican’s Financial Health Rebounds with Significant Surplus, Driven by Faithful’s Support
III. Lessons from the Toolbox: Best Practices in Parish Internal Financial Controls
III. In the Field:
Bankruptcy’s Impact on Transparency and Accountability
The call for transparency and accountability in the U.S. Catholic Church has resounded for more than 20 years, and results from our recent survey demonstrate that Catholics across generations believe that both are essential to long-term renewal.
Overall, more than three-fourths (77%) of respondents ranked building a transparent and accountable leadership culture as a top priority for the future of the Church. And the results indicate that concerns about transparency loom large. For starters, of the 42% who rarely or never give to their parish, almost 40% indicate that a lack of financial transparency is the reason they hold donations back. What’s more, 61% of those who do give indicated that they would give more if there was greater financial transparency.
But the call for greater transparency is not linked to financial oversight alone. A majority of respondents, (53%), believe that abusers are still active and protected in the Church, and 40% said that their diocese does not communicate with transparency about abuse allegations.
These data demonstrate that, while progress has been made, there is more parish and diocesan leaders must do to continue to restore trust. That’s also why recent investigations by both The Free Press and National Catholic Reporter about the extent to which bankruptcy protections allow dioceses to sidestep much needed transparency and accountability around abuse are so worrisome.
Since 2002, when the abuse crisis and the cover-up by Church leadership first came to light, at least 20 states and the District of Columbia have passed child victim laws that either eliminate statutes of limitation or open temporary windows for victims to file civil suits for damages, no matter how long ago the alleged abuse took place. In part due to the flood of cases filed as a result of these changes, 41 dioceses have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, both to protect the ability of the diocese to operate while also ensuring equitable distribution of settlements to so many victims.
While bankruptcy is often the only path forward for a diocese facing the volume of settlement claims, the way the bankruptcy process operates creates a scenario that can work at cross purposes with the goal of transparency and accountability. That’s because, in addition to financial reorganization that comes with bankruptcy agreements, the process immediately stays all civil jury trials and kicks off a largely closed-door mediation process where, almost always, files and records are sealed and anyone who violates the seal could face penalties. Some settlements have required the diocese to release files, but many remain sealed.
As the Church continues to wrestle with the fallout from the decades-long abuse crisis and cover-up, it’s essential to wrestle with how to balance victim support, financial obligations, and leading with transparency and accountability. These investigations are important because they highlight a very real concern that addressing the financial challenges dioceses face can come at the expense of the transparency the faithful rightly demand.
GO DEEPER
The Next Clergy Sex Abuse Scandal Is Taking Place Right Now—in Bankruptcy Court. The Free Press. October 2025.
New Orleans Archdiocese bankruptcy pulls abuse survivor into prolonged ordeal. National Catholic Reporter. November 2025.
Combatting a Closed-Door Leadership Culture
Last month, a former director of stewardship and development in the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph was charged with stealing more than $150,000 of school grant money over four years and spending it for personal use. This summer, the Church of St. Leo the Great in Lincroft, New Jersey, reported that their former finance director systematically stole $1.5 million over six years before an auditor finally discovered financial inconsistencies.
These reports of financial malfeasance illuminate not just a financial problem in the Church, but evidence of a leadership culture problem: that those in authority — lay as well as ordained — are, in some areas, able to make financial and leadership decisions behind closed doors, without accountability or input from others.
Most Catholics encounter this culture in the form of “clericalism” — the belief and practice that ordained leaders should hold the power and make decisions, with little to no input from others. However, lay leaders in positions of authority can also fall prey to promoting a similar culture by leveraging the same insular structures and deference from the parish community to operate with unchecked power and authority. Whether it is the wrongdoing of a clergy, religious, or lay leader, institutional structures that allow decisions to be made behind closed doors, with little input from others, and without accountability, are the opposite of the culture that Catholics demand in the Church. (For more on how parishes can adopt policies and practices that encourage greater financial transparency and accountability, see our “Lessons from the Toolbox” below.)
These reports out of Kansas City and New Jersey reveal that the work of combatting closed-door cultures in the Church is ongoing. Dioceses and parishes must not become complacent, but consistently work to instill and maintain best financial practices within co-responsible governance structures.
GO DEEPER
Measuring and Ranking Diocesan Online Financial Transparency: 2024 Report. Voice of the Faithful. 2024.
National Catholic Reporter Survey Shows Catholic College Students Highly Engaged
Evidence that young adults are highly engaged in Church life continues to mount. A new survey, released in November from National Catholic Reporter and the Wittcoff Foundation, polled 401 Catholic students who attend both Catholic and non-Catholic four-year colleges and universities. The survey found that a majority of self-identified Catholic students regularly attend Mass and consider their Catholic beliefs and identity to be important.
In total, NCR’s survey found 55% of respondents said they attend Mass at least a few times a month and 65% said they pray daily or a few times a week. In addition, 8 in 10 are involved in the Church in some way. These findings come on heels of our own survey that found self-identified Catholics ages 18-29 attend Mass and participate in parish activities more than any other age group, as well as findings from Barna that young adults across all Christian denominations attend Church more than any other generation.
Together, this growing body of research is revealing a shift in American Catholicism, where younger Catholics are more engaged in the Church than other generations. At the same time, there is evidence that engagement today doesn’t ensure engagement tomorrow, as a third of these young adults in our survey reported that they also consider leaving the Church. When asked why, the most common answer was a misalignment between the Church’s position on certain issues and their values.
GO DEEPER
NCR survey: Catholic college students regularly attend Mass, value church’s social teachings. National Catholic Reporter. November 2025.
2025 Survey Report: Trust, Practice, and Renewal in the Catholic Church After Two Decades. Leadership Roundtable. 2025.
New Barna Data: Young Adults Lead a Resurgence in Church Attendance. Barna. September 2025.
Teens Gather for Historic Digital Encounter with Pope Leo
Photo: Vatican News
In a historic moment for American youth, Pope Leo XIV spoke virtually with teenagers gathered at the 2025 National Catholic Youth Conference (NCYC) in Indianapolis last month. Over 16,000 young people gathered at the Lucas Oil Stadium for prayer, Eucharistic Adoration, Confession, fellowship, and to hear from Catholic speakers, including the Pope himself.
NCYC is hosted by the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry (NFCYM) annually in different cities across the country. Leadership Roundtable board member Christina Lamas serves as NFCYM’s Executive Director, and shared that this encounter with Pope Leo “shows that the church is listening, not just speaking. This encounter is not a media event, it’s a synodal moment where one universal church walks with a young church in the United States.”
Several of the young people gathered had the opportunity to go on stage and ask a question personally to Pope Leo, which he answered in real time. The teens asked questions about technology, anxiety, friendships, and the future of the Church. The Holy Father shared with them, “You are not only the future of the Church, you are the present! Your voices, your ideas, your faith matter right now, and the Church needs you, the Church needs what you have been given to share with all of us.”
GO DEEPER
‘It felt like history’: Teens, organizers on cloud nine after live dialogue with Pope Leo. Catholic News Agency. November 2025.
10 takeaways from Pope Leo XIV’s address to youth at NCYC. Catholic News Agency. November 2025.
An easy morning with Pope Leo. OSV News. November 2025.
Vatican’s Financial Health Rebounds with Significant Surplus, Driven by Faithful’s Support
The Holy See has ushered in a period of economic encouragement, closing its 2024 fiscal year with a rare surplus of 1.6 million euros — a dramatic victory after last year’s 51.2 million euro deficit. This achievement, which would rise significantly to 18.7 million euros in surplus when excluding the high costs of Vatican-owned hospitals, speaks volumes about the renewed commitment to fiscal health.
This remarkable turnaround was propelled by the faithful, whose donations soared by 12%, demonstrating increased trust, participation, and support for the Church’s work. Alongside successful financial management and prudent expense control, this collective effort nearly halved the underlying deficit.
Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, Maximino Caballero Ledo, offered a note of measured optimism, stating that the encouraging surplus “demonstrates that the direction taken is positive. Now we must consolidate this progress, aware that some of the results come from nonrecurring elements.”
The focus moving forward remains steadfast: embedding rigorous best practices in finances and upholding the highest standards of transparency and accountability for the Church’s universal mission, “to ensure the continuity of the Holy See’s mission, which by its nature requires a stable economic foundation.”
GO DEEPER
The Holy See closed the 2024 fiscal year with a surplus of $1.86 million. Catholic News Agency. November 2025.
Best Practices in Parish Internal Financial Controls
Effective parish ministries require clergy and lay parish leaders to employ best business management practices and tools. While religious institutions may not be legally held to the accountability standards of other businesses, best financial practices are a necessity to avoid fraud, embezzlement, unchecked authority, and distrust in our Church institutions. While our new survey report shows that people tend to have high trust in their local parish clergy and lay employees, that trust can be easily misused if parishes and dioceses don’t have proper transparency and accountability structures in place.
In Chapter 7 of A Pastor’s Toolbox, Vol. 1, Charles E. Zech, Founder of the Center for Church Management at Villanova University, gives an overview of some practical best practices that dioceses and parishes can put in place to take steps to avoid situations of financial misuse, like those mentioned in the News and Noteworthy section above, and become more financially transparent:
- Perform diocesan audits of parishes: In 2005, Zech conducted a survey that revealed that only 3% of dioceses in the country audited their parishes annually, and 21% seldom or never audited their parishes. In addition to external audits, pastors have the right to request a diocesan audit, especially when getting started at a new parish, to avoid being accused of financial misuse that may have happened before the new pastor’s arrival.
- Establish a good parish finance council: One of the best ways to become a more co-responsible parish is to utilize the gifts and skills of the qualified laity in your parish finance council. A parish finance council is not optional; in fact, the Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law (537) requires that parishes have a parish finance council. This council is there to advise the pastor and to help review financial statements, reports, and budgets.
- Communicate transparently with your parishioners: Parish staff must actively use the parish website, newsletter, social media, and weekly bulletin as a means of transparently communicating about the parish’s weekly collection, operating budget, and finance and parish council meeting minutes. This information should be readily available and easily accessible for any inquiring parishioner.
- Diversify the people handling money: One person at the parish should not have control over deposits, counting the collection, check signing, and reconciling the books. There should always be several sets of eyes to review financials to ensure there has been no misuse of funds, even honest mistakes!
New Leadership Roundtable Survey Captures National Attention
Last month, we released a new report, sharing findings of from our national survey of more than 3,000 Catholics, conducted with John Zogby Strategies to assess the progress the Church has made in restoring trust and building a culture of transparency, co-responsibility, and accountability. The report provides new insights into what matters most to Catholics today regarding faith practices, trust, transparency, giving, and engagement.
Over the past several weeks, this survey report has been featured by more than 16 Catholic news sources, including OSV News, Catholic News Agency, Catholic Vote, and Catholic Online News, as well as several local diocesan news outlets. We are excited to continue to share these survey results as a resource for Catholic leaders serving in all sectors of the Church.
Kerry Robinson Receives the Commodore John Barry Award
We congratulate Kerry Robinson on receiving the 2025 Commodore John Barry Award, awarded by the American Catholic Historical Society. The Barry Award celebrates a distinguished leader in Catholic service and philanthropy whose lifelong dedication has made a transformative impact on communities nationwide.
Kerry is President and CEO of Catholic Charities USA and previously served as Leadership Roundtable’s founding executive director and now serves as a board member. Congratulations, Kerry, on this well-deserved honor!
Leadership Roundtable Performs Diocesan Financial Administration Assessment
Our Services team recently partnered with one of the largest dioceses in the U.S. to perform a unique and comprehensive assessment of the diocese’s financial administration, aimed at strengthening administrative effectiveness, financial stewardship, and parish collaboration. We evaluated the finance department’s capacity to fulfill core responsibilities, including financial reporting, budgeting, managerial accounting, workflow management, long-term financial planning, and staff development. We also examined departmental culture, communication practices, parish relationships, and stewardship practices. Benchmarked against Canon Law, the USCCB’s “Diocesan Financial Management: A Guide to Best Practices,” and Catholic Standards of Excellence, the review gathered insights from internal staff, pastors, parish bookkeepers, diocesan leaders, and members of the Diocesan Finance Council.
A key component of the project included professional development for staff members through the Catholic Leadership 360 feedback process. Participants engaged in orientation sessions, in-depth feedback reviews, and development workshops, ultimately constructing individualized leadership growth plans.
Following months of consultation, data gathering, and staff formation, the project culminated in a comprehensive report offering findings, recommendations, and a sequenced roadmap for improvement. Our final onsite visit included professional development workshops and meetings with the CFO, Vicar General, and bishop to review our final report and recommendations.
