Faith-based groups—including Catholics—have successfully asked a sporting goods store to stop selling assault rifles, tech companies to ban the transmission of child pornography on their phones or photo services, and fast food franchises to offer their workers paid sick leave. Their not-so-secret method is a decades-old tradition known as shareholder advocacy.
What might seem like an obscure financial procedure is, for many Catholic religious communities, a vital part of their charisms. As corporations increasingly threaten public well-being, faith-based shareholders are using their seats at the table to press them to act for the common good. Even as new political battles threaten to curb these religious groups’ influence, their decades-long track record shows even small investors can spur meaningful corporate change.
What is shareholder advocacy?
Shareholder advocacy is the idea that shareholders—as the owners of a publicly traded company—have the responsibility to weigh in on decisions the company makes. Shareholders, through advocacy, can keep companies accountable and transparent and are a guard against the corruptions of nepotism or “crony capitalism.”
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) allows investors who own shares of a publicly traded company to file resolutions that are voted on at a company’s annual general meeting of shareholders. After filing a shareholder resolution—one, for example, that asks a company to evaluate the safety of its gun sales—the company holds dialogues between the investors and the company’s board of directors regarding the issues the resolution raises.
Shareholders vote on resolutions at a company’s annual shareholder meeting, though these resolutions are advisory and not legally binding. A corporation’s proxy statements contain the list of proposals in need of votes, which is sent out to all the shareholders or their representatives—proxies—before the annual meeting. Often, these meetings are held virtually, and the proxy statement’s voting items consist of fairly routine matters—salaries and board elections. Timothy Smith, senior policy advisor at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), estimates that a shareholder resolution with 25 percent of shareholder approval is a success. “It shows a significant bloc of shareholders care,” he says.
An educational ministry
Benedictine Sister Barbara McCracken, a member of the community at Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas, describes shareholder advocacy as an extension of her order’s teaching charism. “We consider ourselves educators, and this is a kind of education,” she says.
At the age of 86, McCracken serves as the shareholder advocate for her community, still living out the same mission as she did during her decades working as a teacher at Donnelly College in Kansas City. “There are people in these groups who learn a lot from us,” she says.
Her community often works with the ICCR to co-file resolutions. With one notable exception: The order was the lead filer on one recent resolution against Denny’s, the restaurant chain.
The sisters filed the resolution in April 2023, asking Denny’s to create a report on the state of paid sick leave at their franchises, which account, they noted, for 96 percent of the restaurant’s locations.
“There is currently,” they wrote, “no public information available pertaining to its paid sick leave policy for either company owned restaurants or franchised operations.” Paid sick leave, they said, was essential for stopping the spread of diseases—like COVID-19—and keeping customers and workers safe. The resolution points out that lack of paid sick leave “contributes to racial, gender, and economic injustice.” That resolution remains unresolved.
McCracker acknowledges that this type of advocacy isn’t available to everyone. Shareholders need to hold $2,000 worth of stock in a company to file a resolution, which equates to roughly 0.000002 percent of the average company on Standard and Poor’s 500 (S&P 500), a stock market index that tracks the performance of the 500 leading companies in the United States. While $2,000 is a small sum to a large investment firm, that sum is a large barrier for many people. Then, in 2020, a ruling changed the requirements for filing a resolution to $25,000 worth of shares over one year, $15,000 over two years, or $2,000 for three years.
Advocacy in action
In January 2018, Mercy Investment Services, a ministry of the Sisters of Mercy in the United States, asked Dick’s Sporting Goods to reevaluate selling assault weapons and to promote more restrictions on gun sales. Just a few weeks later—in the wake of the February 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida—Edward Stack, chief executive officer of Dick’s, announced that the store would cease selling assault weapons.
Mercy Investment Services’ first step was to file a shareholder resolution called a 14a-8. These resolutions are short, 500-word filings that address an issue of concern or request accountability or transparency around a company’s internal governance, workings, or investment strategy. The company then began a dialogue with the investors about their proposal in late January of that year. After these dialogues, the sisters withdrew their proposal following assurances from the management at the company that their concerns were taken seriously.
According to Smith, this is one example of how faith-based shareholders have been petitioning corporations to act in line with moral and ethical concerns for more than 50 years.
“We’re investing in the company and so we’re having an interest in how things are being taken care of: discrimination suits, scandals,” Smith says. Such hits to the company’s reputation can lower the price of stock and lower a shareholder’s return on investment. “What hurts the company also hurts the shareholders,” he says.
ICCR was formed after the Episcopal Church filed a shareholder resolution against General Motors in 1971, asking the company to close its factories in South Africa. This resolution was part of the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which urged corporations to refuse to bank with, lend to, or do business with South Africa’s government for as long as it upheld its apartheid regime of violent segregation between Black and white South Africans.
Today, ICCR advises nonprofits and religious institutes in shareholder advocacy and manages a total of $4 trillion in investments. That’s not an insignificant share of the $100 trillion at play in the stock market, Smith says. And the companies in which they invest have a fiduciary duty to those communities or people who are investing in them.
A holistic ministry
For many religious communities, shareholder advocacy is not the only sort of financial advocacy in which they engage. Katie McCloskey, vice president of Social Responsibility at Mercy Investment Services since 2020, sees shareholder advocacy as “one leg of the stool.”
In “Mensuram Bonum,” a document on “faith-based measures for Catholic investors,” published by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in 2022, the Vatican issued a guide to practice “faith consistent investing”: a three-point call to engage, to enhance, or to exclude (divest).
“I don’t want to oversell that shareholder advocacy in and of itself is sufficient,” McCloskey says. This form of advocacy takes place within a holistic life of gospel mission. For example, religious orders often participate in shareholder advocacy and proxy voting—ensuring they are always using their voice as a shareholder in annual company votes—and in impact investing, or investing funds into companies and organizations that will have a beneficial social or environmental impact. Several orders say divestment from companies like weapons manufacturers and fossil fuel companies is another strategy of faith-based investing.
Sister Sue Ernster, the president of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in La Crosse, Wisconsin, says that for her congregation, shareholder advocacy is a way of participating in their vow of poverty—maintaining a freedom to put their resources at the service of others. “We’ve done our homework, and it does increase awareness of these issues, which is part of living into our vows of poverty,” she says.
When Ernster became treasurer of the congregation in 2013, she began working on shareholder advocacy. She says the sisters had been doing this for nearly two decades before her. Their first resolution was to a company that was advertising alcohol to children under 18. Now, she says, many of their resolutions revolve around climate justice, human rights, sustainability, women’s leadership in corporations, and workers’ rights.
While these issues may seem “political,” they impact both a corporation’s long-term solvency and the common good, the body politic. “When people say, ‘They don’t treat their people well,’ that hurts the company’s reputation among shoppers,” Ernster says. The Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration also participate in impact investing, investing in funds that help companies become employee-owned, and in companies run by Black or Indigenous owners. They have divested from fossil fuels and, in October 2025, returned a roughly two-acre plot of land in Northern Wisconsin to the Lac Du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, the land’s original inhabitants.
Divestment, proxy voting, shareholder advocacy—all of these tactics are forms of participation in the common good, says Meghan Clark, professor of Catholic social teaching at St. John’s University. “Catholic social teaching really emphasizes participation in the common good,” she says. An order that engages in shareholder advocacy is promoting the common good “in a way that invites not only a company but other investors to morally reflect.”
Shareholder advocacy, Clark says, is a form of activism that is onerous, not an easy win. “It takes seriously the call to participate in the common good in ways that are quite difficult,” she says. “The burden of being knowledgeable, of reading everything, of being informed, is really a taking up of a significant moral task.”
Part of the goal of shareholder advocacy is pointing out that the state of the common good is a liability for the company. The company has a “responsibility to make sure that they are not impacting the common good in a way that is impacting the larger economy,” McCloskey says.
Although the common good may ground Catholic participation in shareholder resolutions, there’s a different tactic needed to make the resolutions pass, McCloskey says. The common good is not an argument that faith-based owners can use: “They will get thrown out.”
Instead, faith-based investors emphasize reputational risk. McCloskey uses the example of the opioid epidemic, which contributed negatively to the public’s perception of pharmaceutical companies. Other examples include a company’s financial risk or liability for selling an unsafe product or negatively impacting vulnerable communities or the environment. After one such lawsuit, the gun manufacturer Remington paid $73 million to the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.
In 2016, Christian Brothers Investment Services approached Apple about blocking the distribution of child pornography on Apple products. In 2021, Jeff McCroy, president of Christian Brothers, told Bloomberg News that he felt like the “only investor in the room” at the time. But, over the intervening decade, they have worked with more religious orders and ICCR to pressure large tech platforms and telecommunications firms to institute safeguards. Their concerns are well-founded. In 2023, New Mexico’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against Meta for the ease in which child pornography is distributed and accessed on Facebook and Instagram.
Shareholder advocacy under fire
“The right to petition companies is over five decades old,” Smith of ICCR says. Shareholder advocacy has a strong history of encouraging transparent corporate governance and pushing companies to eliminate social risk for everyone. “There has been a clear, positive impact with many companies, who have updated their disclosures and changed their policies and tactics,” he says.
However, this type of advocacy is currently under attack. On September 10, 2025, the House Committee on Financial Services held a hearing on “Proxy Power and Proposal Abuse: Reforming Rule 14a-8 to Protect Shareholder Value,” in which several witnesses testified before the house committee considering several pieces of legislation updating the rules around shareholder advocacy.
At the hearing, James Copeland, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, characterized shareholder advocacy as being overrun by “activism” that advanced “social or environmental objectives not aligned with the interests of the average shareholder.”
Ferrell Keel, a partner at Jones Day law firm, likewise said that shareholder advocacy is merely a “soapbox for hire.” For $2,000, she said, an activist can buy a “megaphone and a billboard on a company’s proxy statement.” She described shareholder resolutions as activists asking companies to address political issues that do not relate to their daily business. “Rule 14a-8 has turned companies’ annual meetings into political hotbeds,” she said.
Smith rejects those characterizations. “That is really insulting,” he says. He takes issue with the way that those people testifying framed shareholders concerned with corporate governance and the common good as flash-in-the-pan activists who had no real investment in the company. He notes that the United Methodist Church has $26 billion invested in the stock market. “There’s no hijacking,” Smith says. “These are long-term investors who are using their voices.”
Smith contests that critics of these resolutions simply don’t like the issues being raised—diversity, equity, and inclusion; human rights; and climate justice. “They call them political,” he says, “but these issues impact the companies’ bottom line or profitability.”
Smith says that many faith-based investors have significant pension funds or retirement funds at stake in the market. Uncertainties like climate change present a big risk to long-term sustainability. Take, for example, a religious order’s retirement fund, which needs to sustain the order’s schools, hospitals, or universities as well as providing for the community’s convents, retirement homes, and health care for aging members.
Power in numbers
McCloskey says that shareholder resolutions are presented at an annual general meeting in two to three minutes. These meetings are over Zoom, so, she says, a company can control how much attention is given to a resolution. Mercy Investments Services files roughly 160 resolutions a year. A representative noted during the September 10 congressional hearing that the average U.S. company listed on the stock exchange’s Russell 3000 index only receives an average of one shareholder proposal every eight years.
Clark points out that the number of shareholder resolutions depends on the workings of the company in question. She cites the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, who have filed a resolution for four years in a row asking Citibank to examine and defund projects that may infringe on Indigenous rights to work and live on unpolluted land. Citibank issued a report in 2024 that highlighted 37 projects of potential risk, but has only defunded seven.
Experts in shareholder advocacy emphasize that there is more power when owners work together.
“One voice can get drowned out, 10 voices are stronger together,” Ernster says. Religious orders and lay foundations and investment services often work together to jointly file resolutions. And a new initiative, Charism Capital, gathers religious communities’ resources into a pooled investment fund so that sisters can invest together in initiatives that further the common good.
Ernster says that she has been touched by how companies’ board members have been sincerely open to conversation about the issues they have raised. “The companies are open and willing to have the dialogue,” she said. And it is in this dialogue, between investor and management, that she thinks real change can begin to happen. “Although it’s a slower process, it is bringing about change,” she says. “There’s a level of respect that is acknowledged on both sides.”
This article also appears in the January 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 1, pages 15-17). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Pexels/Christina Morillo
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