Pope Leo XIV restores Vatican salaries cut in 2021 and spends his 71st birthday at the Library

Pope Leo XIV turned 71 on Monday and published the gift he had already signed for Vatican staff. A motu proprio dated 1 September, released on his birthday, repeals the salary cuts Pope Francis imposed on 23 March 2021 as a COVID-era cost control. Leo wrote that those measures "can now be overcome, in the certainty that the institutions of the Holy See and the Vatican City State will continue, through various means, their commitment to ensuring economic sustainability." The restoration is effective from 1 September.

The 2021 decree cut cardinals' pay by 10 percent and trimmed salaries for office heads and lower-ranking priests and nuns. Biennial raises were frozen for senior lay employees. Lower-ranking lay staff had continued to receive increments. The cuts were unpopular inside the Apostolic Palace and were left in place through the end of Francis's pontificate. Leo, an Augustinian and a former mathematics student, has told aides the Holy See's books are less strained than the worst briefings after his election suggested.

He spent the morning at the Vatican Apostolic Library, his first visit there as pope, to open a press preview of the exhibition AQVA. Catastrophe and Wonder, which runs from 25 September to 14 May 2027 and includes an installation, Diluvium, by the French artist JR. Archbishop Giovanni Cesare Pegazzi, who heads the Library and Archives, had a cake with one candle brought out. Staff sang Tanti auguri a te. Leo blew out the candle. He told the room that his mother had been a librarian and that it was fitting to spend the birthday with them. "God, in His providence, and sometimes with a touch of humor, always reminds us that he is with us."

A second decree on Monday cancelled a plan to move secret archival holdings to a pontifical university across town. Leo ordered a new building inside Vatican City instead, to keep ancient manuscripts and archival collections on the same campus as the Library. He also said the Library and Archives would gain significant extra space. The Library is open to scholars by request. A small exhibition room is open to the public by ticket.

The salary restoration is the item that will be felt in pay packets. It is also a statement about how Leo reads the Francis fiscal emergency: serious enough to have justified cuts in 2021, no longer serious enough to keep them. Building a new archive inside the walls, rather than sending boxes across the river, is a second statement about where he wants the paper to live. Both decisions landed on the same morning as a cake in the Library. The motu proprio is the document that will still be in force when the cake is gone.