The Vatican made news this week with an announcement of a small step toward more generous family leave policies for its employees, which include staff in Vatican governance and at the Vatican museums, its post office and police and fire departments. On July 28, Pope Leo XIV approved an enhanced benefit first announced by Pope Francis in January that extends paternity leave for new fathers from three to five paid days off.

Other family-friendly policy changes included raising the age limit for children of employees covered under the Vatican’s family allowance to 26 for continuing university students and adding three paid working days off each month for employees with a child who faces a severe disability. The Vatican also gives employees a one-time payment when they have a new baby—currently 2,481.88 euros ($2,877).

Left unchanged was the Vatican’s paid maternity leave, which includes the final month of pregnancy and five months after the arrival of a new child. The leave is extendable to an additional six months at half pay.

European exceptionalism

While the Vatican’s new fathers are no doubt happy to receive the extra days off to bond with their newborns or adopted or fostered children, it is fair to describe this improved paternity allowance as a tad parsimonious, especially in comparison to the slightly more generous standards of European states. The European Union requires its member states to offer two weeks paid paternity leave though they are free to offer more and many do. In Italy new fathers must take two weeks off; new mothers must take five months leave. Both parents then have the option of parental leave up to 11 months at diminishing salary percentages.

After years of attempts to reverse declining birthrates, alas mostly unsuccessfully, European nations have created a bonanza of perks and benefits for new parents well beyond months of leave for new mothers and fathers. From baby boxes with all the essentials in Finland to generous child care and monthly allowances to assist families in France, European states are trying to remove economic and social barriers to family creation.

But as modest as they are compared to some E.U. states, the Vatican’s family leave revisions are standouts put against an outlier among advanced economies. Can you guess which one that might be?

Alone among its international peers, the United States has no national mandate for paid maternity or paternity leave. The absence of a national policy has led to a mishmash of practices and expectations across the country as individual states create and enforce their own standards.

Many businesses and corporations in the U.S. private sector—attentive to competition for job candidates seeking family-friendly benefits—have voluntarily established paid family leave and paternity and maternity leave policies, but none are required to do so under federal law. The 1993 U.S. Family and Medical Leave Act only requires businesses of 50 or more employees to offer unpaid leave of up to 12 weeks while protecting the jobs of workers who take the time off. As you might imagine, it is the unpaid part of that weak mandate that creates obstacles to family formation in the United States that are simply unknown throughout the rest of the affluent world.

Oregon, Washington, Colorado, California and Massachusetts are among the states that have established the most generous mandates for family leave, beginning with the requirement that parental and family leave include eight to 12 paid weeks off. A 2024 report card from The Century Foundation reports that just 13 states and the District of Columbia have established paid family and medical leave (and shockingly, just 15 states and the District of Columbia require paid sick leave). 

Among the lowest-scoring states on The Century Foundation’s report card, Alabama, West Virginia, Florida, Wyoming and Idaho “lack even basic policies and protections. None of the worst five states have a statewide paid sick day policy or paid family medical leave policy.” Those worst-performing states also host median incomes so low that they severely limit a family’s ability to accept unpaid leave after the arrival of a new baby.

When the church is the boss

The U.S. Catholic Church has long been a supporter, at least philosophically, of better family leave policies. In congressional testimony in 2023, Archbishop Borys Gudziak, the chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development and the Metropolitan-Archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, regretted that the United States “is one of only a handful of countries, and the only high-income country, that does not guarantee paid family leave.”

He added that the “current patchwork system of family leave programs leaves too many families behind.” Archbishop Gudziak argued that a federal mandate meant “to support families as they welcome new life and care for one another in their most vulnerable periods” would be an expression of a truly pro-life policy.

“National support of paid family leave is an important step towards building an authentically life-affirming society that prioritizes the well-being of families,” the archbishop said.

But the church’s rhetorical support for generous family and parental leave has not always translated into the creation of such policies at U.S. Catholic dioceses, schools and institutions of all stripes. Church employers, it is fair to say, have earned a problematic reputation when it comes to what should be no-brainers like adequate leave for new mothers and fathers.

An investigation conducted by researchers at FemCatholic in 2022 found that a dishearteningly small number of dioceses offered fully paid leave to new mothers, a lapse that is particularly affecting young women just entering the workforce who have not accumulated enough work hours to reach thresholds even for unpaid leave. After reaching out to dioceses across the country, FemCatholic researchers found that among the dioceses that responded, only 31 offered fully paid maternity leave, while 32 provided some percentage of employee salaries through either short-term disability or state paid leave laws; 44 dioceses did not offer any paid leave and only four dioceses offered 12 weeks of fully paid leave. (Full Disclosure: America offers 16 weeks of paid leave to both mothers and fathers upon the arrival of a new child.)

FemCatholic’s researchers concluded that the diocesan family leave shortfalls “broadly reflect overall national trends.” The U.S. Department of Labor reported in March 2023 that just 27 percent of civilian workers had access to paid family leave through their employer, and only 41 percent had access to short-term disability insurance through employers.

Giving fathers leave

The weakness of family leave policies in the United States is stark in comparison to other nations around the world. Member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development offer an average of more than 18 weeks for paid maternity leave, ranging from a high of 43 weeks in Greece to zero in the United States.

Paid paternity leave among O.E.C.D. states averages 2.3 weeks. Spain is well ahead of other O.E.C.D. members at 16 weeks—more than three times the leave offered to fathers in second place Portugal. The United States was, again, the only O.E.C.D. member to offer no national mandate on paternity time off.

Paternity leave for new fathers is an idea that has been gathering momentum around the world. A study conducted by researchers at the WORLD Policy Analysis Center at U.C.L.A. found that the share of countries globally providing paid leave to fathers has nearly tripled since 1995. The comparative inattention to that culture shift in the United States becomes especially hard to justify against the rapid expansion of leave for both parents in parts of the world that are far less affluent.

The WORLD team found that the number of African Union countries providing paid leave to fathers more than quadrupled from 1995 to 2022. “Altogether, 63% of countries worldwide, 78% of high-income countries, and 100% of countries in the European Union (EU) guarantee paid leave to dads,” WORLD reports. “Meanwhile, the U.S. fails to provide any paid leave nationally.”

The federal government’s indifference to paternity leave should not come as a surprise, considering its decades-long inaction on maternity leave.

“When we began tracking leave policies globally in 2000, 18 countries still hadn’t passed leave for mothers of infants,” said WORLD Principal Research Analyst Amy Raub. “Today, it’s only the U.S., Papua New Guinea, and five small island nations that still have no paid leave policy. The U.S.’s continued failure to adopt paid leave for either parent is setting women back and hurting our economy.”

A federal mandate on family leave had been included in former president Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better,” post-Covid-19 legislation that was unable to break through a de facto veto in the Senate from West Virginia’s former senator Joe Manchin. Mr. Manchin’s resistance put an end to the plan that would have also included historic investments in child care and pre-kindergarten expansion as well as have made permanent a popular and effective pandemic-era expansion of the Child Tax Credit program.

Mr. Biden made a last effort in 2024, adding paid family leave to his 2025 federal budget proposal, but the plan got no traction in Congress. There seems little likelihood that the issue will arouse the interest of the current resident of the White House, though two proposals currently before the House make baby steps toward a rational, national policy on family leave if the idea were to catch the president’s eye.

If it helps Mr. Trump, expansion of family leave is popular by a wide margin among U.S. voters. A national survey in 2018 found that 94 percent of Democrats, 83 percent  of Independents and 74 percent of Republicans support a national policy “that would cover all working people who need leave to care for a newborn or newly adopted child; their own serious illness or injury; a seriously ill, injured, elderly, or disabled family member; or to deal with the effects of a deployment or injury of a military service member.”

Despite the highest hopes of its legislative authors, who viewed the Family and Medical Leave Act as the beginning, not the end to improvements to family leave standards in the United States, 32 years after the F.M.L.A. became law, adequate leave policies remain out of reach for the low-income workers who would benefit the most from them.

“Given the gaps in the current paid family leave offerings, a national paid leave policy is needed to help ensure families, especially those who are most vulnerable, have access to paid family leave,” Archbishop Gudziak said in his testimony before Congress. “Many employers would like to offer paid family leave but cannot do so financially without a national or state architecture in place to make it more feasible.”

So let’s offer some polite applause this week for Vatican baby steps on parental leave but reserve our energy for more attention to the lackluster performance on the U.S. home front. U.S. policymakers and employers have a lot of catching up to do if they want to make America’s family life a little greater—or at least a little easier.

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Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).