Pope Leo XIV November Prayer: Proper Use of Wealth

Pope Leo XIV's prayer intention for November 2026 is "for the proper use of wealth". He asks Catholics to pray that wealth be used responsibly and shared with those in need, not hoarded or used as power over others.

The Pope released the monthly "Pray with the Pope" video on Tuesday, prepared by the Pope's Worldwide Prayer Network, and the message at its heart is disarmingly simple. True wealth, he says, lies not in accumulating or possessing, but in giving with love. It is a sentence that sounds gentle until you sit with it, and then it starts to ask uncomfortable questions about the things we keep just in case.

Every month the Pope names a single intention for the Church to carry in prayer, and November's choice lands as the gap between rich and poor dominates headlines on every continent. The Pope is not offering an economic policy. He is offering a prayer, and a challenge to the heart that holds the wealth.

"Forgive Us for Storing Up Instead of Sharing"

The most striking line in the video is a confession, not a lecture. "Forgive us for storing up instead of sharing," Pope Leo said, "for using goods as power rather than as service." It is a prayer in the first person plural, and it includes the Pope himself. Nobody is standing outside it, pointing a finger at someone else.

The Pope recalled that everything we have comes from the Lord, including what he called "fertile land, the talents we've received, the effort of those who came before us." His point is that nothing we hold arrived by our effort alone. The ground was there before us, the talents were given, and the people before us built what we now enjoy. "Nothing is ours alone — everything is a shared gift," he said.

Yet, so often, the Holy Father observed, "we let the wealth we seek or attain harden our hearts, lock us in selfishness, and make us forget the most vulnerable." It is a precise diagnosis of a familiar disease. Wealth does not only buy things. It can also close doors, build walls, and quietly edit the poor out of our field of vision.

True Wealth Is Found in Giving

The Pope recalled that Jesus reminds us "that true wealth is not found in what we keep, but in what we give with love." It is a line that turns the usual logic of wealth upside down. In the world's accounting, wealth grows by keeping. In the Pope's accounting, it grows by giving. The gap between what believers give and what they could give is stark, as Today: Churches Could Gain $30 Billion a Year If Giving Became Consistent, Study Finds shows.

He added that a heart detached from possessions "transforms the world," for it "opens paths of justice, tears down walls of indifference, and sows hope among the poor." Detachment, in his telling, is not coldness. It is freedom.

The prayer asks that the Spirit teach us to use what we have, be it money, time, talents, or opportunities, as "instruments of fraternity." The list is deliberately wide. Wealth is not only money. It is also the hour you could spare, the skill you could lend, the door you could open.

A Prayer for Every Economic Decision

"May each economic, family, or community decision," the Pope continued, "spring from a free heart, able to recognize that every good is meant for all, and that only by sharing we build the future." It reaches into the family budget and the business meeting alike.

It is worth remembering that this same Pope has been welcoming the world into the Vatican in recent days, from Today: Pope Leo XIV Meets Bob Dylan at the Vatican and Gives Him a Rosary to the visit of House of David Star Meets Pope Leo XIV in Rome. The prayer intention belongs to the same pattern: a Pope who meets people where they are and then asks them, gently, to look at what they hold and who it could help.

The monthly intentions come through the Pope's Worldwide Prayer Network, founded in 1844 as the Apostleship of Prayer and entrusted to the Society of Jesus. In December 2020, Pope Francis established it as a Vatican Foundation and approved its final statutes in July 2024. Today it is present in more than 92 countries, forming a spiritual community of more than 22 million people who seek to live each day with availability to God's mission.

That scale matters. When the Pope names an intention, it is not a private devotion. It is carried by millions of people in dozens of languages, in parishes and homes and prayer groups across the world. A single sentence about wealth, prayed by 22 million people, becomes something larger than a sentence.

The Trenton Monitor, reporting the intention on 5 November, noted the same emphasis: wealth used responsibly and shared with those in need, never hoarded.

A prayer intention is not a news item to read and forget. It is an assignment. For the rest of November, Catholics who take up the Pope's intention will be asking themselves, in small daily ways, what proper use of wealth looks like in their own lives.

And the question has a habit of lingering after the month ends. November will pass, and a new intention will arrive in December. But the habit of asking whether what we hold is serving others, or only serving us, is not a monthly exercise. It is a way of living, and the Pope knows it.

Whether the prayer changes anything will depend on the people who pray it. A heart detached from possessions transforms the world, the Pope said. November is the month to find out whether he is right, one decision, one gift, and one open hand at a time.

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.