Pope Leo XIV on Thursday turned to a fellow Augustinian to oversee the Vatican’s charity works, appointing Archbishop Luis Marín de San Martín as chief almsgiver and prefect of the Vatican’s charity office. The Associated Press reported the appointment as a sign of continuity with the approach used during Pope Francis’s tenure, when the long-running Vatican role became more prominent and more directly connected to the pope’s own charitable activity.
Marín is a Spanish member of Leo’s religious order and also serves as an undersecretary in the Vatican’s synod office, according to the AP report. In the new assignment, he succeeds Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, who is set to move to Poland as archbishop of Lodz.
The AP report said Lodz has been without an archbishop for a year, placing the transition in the context of a diocese awaiting new leadership. It also described Krajewski’s profile as unusually visible for a Vatican official tied to charitable giving, noting that he helped turn the almsgiver role into a hands-on position within the pope’s public life.
Under Pope Francis, the AP said, the chief almsgiver role was redefined so it functioned as an extension of the pope’s own charitable work—particularly for actions Francis said he could no longer carry out himself. Francis asked Krajewski to serve as a kind of active, on-the-ground representative of the pope’s charity.
The AP report said Krajewski became one of Francis’s most visible officials, including by installing showers for homeless people around St. Peter’s Square, and by sitting at Francis’s side at public audiences. It also said Krajewski spearheaded Vatican donations that ranged from ambulances for Ukraine to COVID-19 vaccines for a group of transgender prostitutes.
The AP further described Krajewski’s charity outreach beyond Rome, including travel to Lesbos in Greece to bring refugees to Rome and efforts in Lampedusa, where he provided 1,600 free calling cards to migrants so they could contact their families after surviving the Mediterranean crossing. It also said the office’s work is funded through the production of papal parchments—handmade certificates with a photo of the pope—that the faithful can buy for occasions such as weddings, baptisms, or priestly ordinations.
The appointment comes after the AP described a longer history for the office, tracing it to a papal bull from the 13th-century Pope Innocent III and noting that Pope Gregory X later organized it into an official Holy See office for papal charity. Before Krajewski, the AP said the post was often held by an aging Vatican diplomat near retirement age, while Francis reshaped it into a more dynamic position.