History
The Catholic Church in the United States began as an immigrant church in what was a predominantly Protestant culture. As Catholic immigrants arrived, so did bishops, clergy, sisters, and brothers, anxious to serve immigrant needs and cultivate the Catholic faith.
Money was as scarce in religious communities as it was in the immigrants' pockets, and any funds that religious communities earned or saved were used to build Catholic hospitals, schools, and social service agencies. In more recent decades, religious communities also invested significantly in the education of their members for ministry.
Earlier in their history in the United States, religious communities attracted many members to a life of service and prayer. Young members attended to the physical needs of frail and elderly members and health care services were often provided by Catholic hospitals and Catholic physicians. Retirement planning and pension plans were viewed by many as contrary to a faith-based life of service.
By the 1970s, however, signs of a "retirement problem" were becoming evident and in 1986 The Wall Street Journal published a groundbreaking article by John J. Fialka calling attention to what he described as a crisis. The issue, which had not been widely publicized and was poorly understood, was also detailed in an Arthur Andersen & Company study. The religious sensibility, as one sister said, was that "long-range planning was somehow in conflict with the providence of God."
As early as 1971, though, the National Catholic Educational Association held workshops on retirement costs and the feasibility of a national pension program for religious. In 1986, the Task Force on Religious Retirement, made up of representatives of religious leadership in the United States, established the National Religious Retirement Office (NRRO), originally called the Tri-Conference Retirement Office. The first national appeal was conducted in 1988 and the NRRO mission encompassed four goals: fundraising for the $2 billion projected unfunded liability at religious institutes; assistance for institutes in desperate circumstances; compensation adjustments for religious workers; and education for religious about retirement issues.