When the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops published a pastoral letter called “Stewardship: A Disciple’s Response” in 1992, they likely expected a warm reception. After all, stewardship—our time, talents, and treasure—seems uncontroversial. But as the bishops noted in the 10th anniversary edition of the letter, published in 2002, the letter drew sharp criticism.
The bishops had certainly attempted to address a broad topic. The document aims to offer comprehensive solutions to ecclesial financial concerns that, in turn, are wrapped up in worries about ecclesial disaffiliation and dwindling of parish communities. But some readers were frustrated by what they saw as a missed opportunity: Instead of offering practical guidance on parish fundraising, the letter focused on a sweeping vision of stewardship as a holistic “way of life.”
“What we expected from the bishops,” a fundraiser says in the 2002 edition, “is guidance in how to make donations to the Church a religious experience motivated by the high ideals of stewardship.”
One piece of advice the bishops offer is to center stewardship as a religious phenomenon; first and foremost, the Christian person is a steward of their Christian vocation. But the document does also offer advice about financial giving models: targeted gifts, the biblical concept of tithing, and enforcing a required “minimum giving” for families enrolled in parish schools that can help encourage a spirit of “maximum giving” among the congregation.
Such language leads to questions: giving what and to whom? This question, in turn, leads to a silent, central question underlying the entire document: Who owns the church?
“Stewardship: A Disciple’s Response” suggests a corporate structure for the church, in which the “executives,” the chief stakeholders of the church, are the bishops, pastors, and executive employees. These people are responsible for “articulating the mission and goals; identifying opportunities for investment; planning; ensuring accountability; and soliciting major gifts.”
Lay parishioners, on the other hand, “must accept responsibility for their parishes and contribute generously—both money and personal service—to their programs and projects. The success or failure of parish programs, the vitality of parish life or its absence, the ability or inability of a parish to render needed services to its members and the community depend upon all.”
“Priests are not the bosses of the laity,” Pope Francis said in his October 2024 prayer intention. Nevertheless, priests in the United States have sometimes used this corporate analogy to describe their role in the church.
As middle managers of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporations that provide the ownership structure of church property in the United States, perhaps clerics could be forgiven their disagreement with the pope. Catholic businesses and business schools, like dioceses, often echo secular cultures rather than create structures grounded in Catholic social teaching or the first principles of the gospel. But some Catholic business programs have found small ways to challenge the corporate status quo.
What is Catholic business?
In the three decades since the bishops first wrote their letter, business has become the most popular undergraduate major in the United States, and interest in graduate business programs has increased drastically over the past five years. Applications to graduate business schools increased 12 percent from 2023 to 2024 according to Poets&Quants, which covers graduate business programs. Simultaneously, 80 percent of schools reported growth in their two-year Master of Business Administration programs.
Most business schools at large Catholic universities follow their secular peers and advertise the job placements of their graduates within six months of graduation and their median salaries. These statistics reflect what most students are concerned about when applying to a business management program: getting a job, or, if they are already employed, a more senior—and higher-paying—position.
When choosing a program, the vast majority of students looking for an MBA consider these statistics and school rankings, which this data contributes to.
There are only five business schools at Catholic universities that rank in the top 100 business schools according to the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings: Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business (20), the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business (30), Boston College’s Carroll School of Business (46), Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business (62), and University of Detroit Mercy’s College of Business Administration (79).
Many students looking for high-profile accounting jobs at major accounting firms or prestigious consulting firms such as Ernst & Young or McKinsey & Company will only consider business programs below the top 10 as back-up schools.
Chris Corragio, 36, attended Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empresa (IESE) Business School in Barcelona, more because of its high rankings than its Catholic identity. The Financial Times’ global rankings of business schools awards the Opus Dei-founded IESE a prime third-place spot. In comparison, Georgetown University’s McDonough School is at 45, Fordham’s Gabelli School is 78, Mendoza College at Notre Dame is 75, and Catholic universities in Dublin and Lisbon rank in the 70s.
As a gay student, Corragio found the Catholic identity almost a drawback, since there were certain restrictions against starting an LGBTQ+ student club on campus. But he was drawn to the culture, which he describes as very Spanish and distinct from U.S.-based schools.
When visiting the campus, he noticed his fellow prospective students at IESE were collaborative and supportive rather than cutthroat. He says students always helped one another, despite limited internship openings or job opportunities. He describes his Teach for America interview, which he did several years prior to applying for his MBA, as far more competitive. “I would take [IESE] any day over a U.S. school that was more ‘progressive,’ ” he says.
Catholic social teaching in business
Other Catholic business schools promote a curriculum that includes courses on Catholic social teaching or moral theology.
Franciscan University of Steubenville’s Master of Business Administration program recently went through a comprehensive review, during which time they welcomed Joann Sciarrino as their program director. The program emphasizes “personal holiness” and “excellence in virtuous leadership.” A press release announcing Sciarrino’s new position connected the academic pursuit of an MBA with the school’s Catholic identity: “While secular MBAs seek to prepare students for a profession, Franciscan’s program will place an even greater emphasis on forming students in their God-given vocation to sanctify the temporal order.”
In past years, Sciarrino says graduates of the master’s program have gotten “typical MBA jobs” after graduation. But she also says the graduate school is creating new programming to integrate Catholic social teaching into their curriculum. One initiative will invite a Franciscan friar from the university to respond to a case study where he applies Catholic social teaching to a business scenario.
“If we only teach profit maximization and shareholder return of all profits as the only purpose of a business,” Karel Sovak, dean of the Gary Theraldson School of Business at the University of Mary, says, “then it shouldn’t be surprising when students leave most business schools with that belief.”
Sovak has taught at the private university in Bismarck, North Dakota, since 2002 and has served as dean for the past five years. Sovak began piloting a course on Catholic social teaching in business in 2015. Over the past decade, it has grown into a required course for all students at the business school—except for finance and accounting students.
“We talk about what these ideas mean, why strive for them, and how to understand how all these things come into play to create a work environment that is ideal, but no means out of reach,” Sovak says.
Their curriculum, he says, is framed in the “triple goods” model, where corporations have the right to create products that are good for consumers or the environment and to use the wealth they create for good. “Profits and wages alone do not have the capacity to bind people together in a way that enables them to flourish,” he says, quoting Michael Naughton, a professor of business and Catholic studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul.
The University of Mary also introduces students to alternative models of capitalism: worker-owned cooperatives and ESOPs—employee stock ownership plans—which hold the company in a trust that benefits the workers at the company.
Sovak loves introducing students to Catholic social teaching and “watching the lightbulbs come on, like ‘I can do this; I can be this,’ ” he says. Ultimately, for Sovak, a job is not just a means to an end—he offers students a “new end” to strive for. And some strive after it.
Several University of Mary business graduates have started S Corporations, or companies with fewer than 100 shareholders (all of whom are required to be people, trusts, or estates rather than corporate entities or businesses), which distribute income and losses through their shareholders rather than being taxed as a separate entity. S Corporations hew more closely to the Catholic social teaching principle of subsidiarity, which means endowing those persons closest to a problem with the most power to solve it. They are a sort of middle ground between a traditional corporation and a cooperative.
Catholics for cooperatives
As Nathan Schneider reported in America magazine in 2016, Catholics have a particular affinity for worker-owned cooperatives. The world’s largest worker-owned cooperative, Mondragon Corporation, was founded by a Catholic priest, Venerable José María Arizmendiarrieta, whose cause is currently at the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints. Mondragon is one of the largest cooperatives in Spain, taking in more than 11 billion euros in revenue in 2023, according to the Financial Times.
At Mondragon, the roughly 80,000 workers at the 95 autonomous cooperative organizations vote democratically in decisions—one worker, one vote—as opposed to the majority shareholders and billionaire investors who run some corporations in the United States. In contrast to the pay ratio of 268-to-1 that the American Federation of Labor (AFL) recorded in 2023 between chief executives and the average worker, the pay gap between the highest and lowest paid workers at Mondragon is 6 to 1.
Mondragon has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor, the Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattolica, and the Financial Times.
Despite the company’s prominence, none of the Catholic MBA programs I spoke with for this article had a course on cooperative economics or Mondragon. Even IESE Business School, located in Spain just like Mondragon, does not have a course dedicated to cooperative economics, Mondragon, or Arizmendiarrieta.
“Most people in the United States don’t even know about Mondragon,” Michael Pirson, a professor of global sustainability at Gabelli Business School, Fordham University, says, “and when they hear about it, they think it’s kind of socialist.”
Pirson does introduce his students to Mondragon. He uses it as an example of “humanistic management” in his courses and in his books. Humanistic management, he says, is the protection of human dignity and the promotion of a person’s well-being as a leadership practice. This is distinct, he says, from the unconscious type of management taught in a typical business school, which focuses on the maximalization of profit rather than the dignity of the worker.
Pirson suggests that traditional business schools might not talk about Mondragon because students who receive a typical business education are formed for a specific corporate culture. That corporate culture does not necessarily prioritize the creativity and collaboration it takes to be a worker-owner in a cooperative. To learn how to work at a cooperative, you might just have to train at the cooperative, he says.
There is an MBA alternative for cooperatives: St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia is unique in offering a master’s degree in cooperative management at its International Centre for Co‑operative Management.
But, to underscore Pirson’s point, Erin Hancock, the program manager for the master’s in cooperative management, says the average student who comes to them has roughly 18 years of working experience, the majority of those spent in the cooperative sector. Not having experience is not a barrier to entry, but she says all students must have a “current affiliation with the sector—being an employee, board member, committee member, volunteer, consultant, or working in an organization that supports co-ops in some way.”
Synodality in business
Ownership is a fundamental concern of Catholic social teaching. To return to “Stewardship: A Disciple’s Response,” Archbishop Thomas Murphy, the chair of the ad hoc committee that led the creation of the letter, said in a 1992 interview that working on the document prompted him to reflect on questions of ownership: “What do I own and what owns me?”
But the word ownership is not mentioned one single time in the pastoral letter, despite the fact that collective ownership—holding all things in common—is a defining characteristic of the early church, as depicted in Acts 2:44–45: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”
Shared ownership—distributing ownership equally among employees and owners of a corporation—is highlighted in Rerum Novarum (On Capital and Labor) and other papal documents as a key tenet of Catholic social teaching. “The law, therefore, should favor ownership,” wrote Pope Leo XIII in 1891, “and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.” St. Pope John Paul II highlighted the proposals “put forward by experts in Catholic social teaching and by the highest magisterium of the church” for “joint ownership of the means of work” in Laborem Exercens (On Human Work), his encyclical celebrating the 90th anniversary of Rerum Novarum.
In his first address to the city and the world on May 8 in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Leo XIV—who shares a name with the first “labor pope,” Leo XIII—emphasized the importance of being a synodal church and of listening and walking together. He has since talked about the importance of dialogue and mutual cooperation. Multiple times, Leo has stressed the common call of the baptized to live the mission of the church.
The Synod on Synodality, which concluded its formal sessions last October in Rome, has, over the course of the past four years, synthesized the reflections of the global church on how to walk together as a pilgrim church.
For the next three years, the synod of bishops will work with laypeople to implement the synod’s proposals, which were presented in a final document and affirmed by Pope Francis as part of the magisterium of the church in 2024. A 2028 “post-synodal assembly” will assess how well the implementation has gone.
In its final document, published in October 2024, the synod reiterated that the call to walk together as a church is founded on the sacrament of baptism, which is the foundation of Christian life and identity. “There is nothing higher than this baptismal dignity, equally bestowed upon each person, through which we are invited to clothe ourselves with Christ,” the final document declared.
Christians’ common baptism inspired members of the earliest churches to a radical solidarity: praying and cooperating together and holding common ownership with one another.
This theology of baptism, in contrast to corporatism or consumerism, offers a framework for understanding the U.S. bishops’ 1992 pastoral letter. As all who are baptized into the mystical body of Christ have equal dignity, all are likewise summoned to shared responsibility and shared ownership of the goods of creation. So the answer to the question of who owns the church might be: all of us.
This article also appears in the September 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 9, pages 10-14). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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