Why Catholics Make Planned Gifts: Stewardship, Gratitude, and Legacy

By Rhen Hoehn, Director of Marketing

Ask a development director why a parishioner should leave a bequest, and the first answer is almost always about taxes. It's the safest-feeling answer available. It's concrete, it sounds like expertise, and it lets you talk about a will without talking about death.

It is also the weakest opening you have with a Catholic donor.

Why does the tax-first ask underperform with Catholic donors?

The tax-first ask underperforms because tax treatment is a reason to structure a gift a particular way, not a reason to make one. Donors decide to give for reasons that have nothing to do with the tax code, then they ask their attorney how to do it efficiently. Lead with the second question and you've skipped the first.

Three specific problems follow.

• It commoditizes you. Every qualified charity in the country offers the same treatment. If efficiency is the case, the donor has no reason to choose your parish, your school, or your religious community over any other organization.
• It's the wrong concern for most estates. For the majority of donors you'll ever sit with, federal estate tax is simply not the operative issue. Building a case on it makes you sound like you're solving a problem the donor doesn't have.
• It produces fragile gifts. A bequest motivated by efficiency has no attachment to your mission. It gets revised out when circumstances change, and nobody notices until the estate closes.

There's a deeper issue. Leading with tax benefits inverts the order of the thing. The gift comes first; the benefit is incidental. When you reverse that, you are asking a person to treat the disposition of everything they own as an optimization exercise, and most Catholics, when you give them the room, do not experience it that way at all.

The question you want the donor to be asking is not "What am I giving away?" It's "What am I sending ahead?"

Getting a donor to that question is the actual work. Catholic social teaching and planned giving connect at exactly this point, and the connection is not decorative. It changes what you say in the room.

What does stewardship mean, and why is it a stronger frame?

Stewardship, in Catholic usage, is not a program a donor participates in. It's a description of what a person is in relation to everything they hold. That's a much larger claim than "please consider a gift," and it's the reason the frame carries weight.

The USCCB pastoral letter Stewardship: A Disciple's Response gives the definition worth committing to memory. A Christian steward is one who "receives God's gifts gratefully, cherishes and tends them in a responsible and accountable manner, shares them in justice and love with others, and returns them with increase to the Lord."

Four verbs: receives, tends, shares, returns. Notice where the planned gift falls. It isn't a fifth activity bolted onto the end of a stewardship program. It's the fourth verb, the final and most complete instance of returning, made at the one moment when a person can dispose of everything at once.

That's why the framing works on donors who have never given a major gift in their lives. It doesn't ask them to become something new. It asks them to finish something they've been doing for forty years.

The teaching underneath it

Three sources support the same argument, and while you don't need all three in any given conversation, you need to know they're there.

The Catechism grounds it in the nature of ownership itself. The earth and its resources were entrusted to the common stewardship of the human race (CCC §2402). Private property is legitimate and good, but it never cancels that original gift: the owner of any property is a steward of Providence, charged with making it fruitful and communicating its benefits to others (CCC §2404). This is not a counsel of poverty. It's a counsel of trusteeship.

John Paul II locates the work squarely with the laity. In Christifideles Laici, the lay faithful are called by their "secular character" to the Christian animation of the temporal order (§36), and money is part of the temporal order. How a Catholic earns, holds, shares, and finally disperses wealth is not spiritually neutral. It belongs to the lay vocation, not adjacent to it. The exhortation echoes 1 Peter 4:10 to make the point: gifts received are to be employed for one another, as good stewards.

Aquinas supplies the piece most fundraisers never reach for. In his treatment of liberality (Summa Theologiae II-II, Q.117), generous giving is not the painful surrender of something loved. It is the rightly ordered use of material goods, a virtue, and one that brings the giver genuine joy precisely because it corresponds to reality. Under this account, the donor who makes a bequest is not losing anything. She is exercising a virtue at full stretch.

Put those together and the giving continuum stops looking like a ladder of program tiers. Annual giving, major gifts, and legacy gifts are one integrated life expressed across time. A well-formed steward arrives at a planned gift as the horizon of their generosity, not as a separate decision requiring separate persuasion. Which is a practical argument for keeping planned giving inside your stewardship formation rather than in a brochure rack of its own.

Why does gratitude work where obligation and fear don't?

Gratitude works because it's the only posture that treats the donor as a person rather than a resource. Everything else, like urgency, scarcity, duty, or the vague suggestion that the government is circling, treats the donor as a problem to be solved and, worse, communicates the organization's own anxiety.

This is the heart of the spirituality of stewardship, and Henri Nouwen states it as compactly as anyone has: "Gratitude flows from the recognition that who we are and what we have are gifts to be received and shared."

A donor who has internalized this concept, that what they hold was received, and is meant to be shared, arrives at legacy giving on their own. Your job is not to install the conviction, but rather to notice whether it's already there and, if it is, to give it somewhere to go.

The practical test is whether you can name, before any conversation, three specific things you are grateful for about this donor and their history with your mission. If you can't, you aren't ready for the meeting.

Two models of the legacy ask

The right invitation isn't "would you consider including us in your estate plan?" It's closer to "your giving has shaped this place for four decades, here's how it keeps going." Mission first, instrument second.

How do you answer "am I shortchanging my children?"

You answer it by agreeing with the premise. Provision for family is always appropriate, and a charitable gift does not have to compete with a child's wellbeing. Any answer that argues otherwise deserves to fail.

This is the objection that ends more legacy conversations than any other, and it usually surfaces sideways, as a joke, or as a comment about how the kids are counting on the house. Listen to it fully before you respond. The instinct to rush past it toward the gift is one to distrust.

Then make the structural point, which is genuinely useful information most donors don't have: a legacy gift is not a binary. Three common structures honor both considerations at once.

1. A partial bequest, a stated fraction of the estate rather than the whole, so family provision is untouched in principle and in fact.
2. A residuary gift, the charity receives what remains after every family provision has been satisfied. Family is paid first, by design.
3. A beneficiary designation, a retirement account or life insurance policy named to the organization, entirely separate from the will and from whatever the donor is leaving to children.

Those options move the conversation from "how much am I taking from my kids?" to "which asset makes sense for this?" That is a far more comfortable question, and the donor's attorney can answer it in ten minutes.

How should you use Scripture in a planned giving conversation?

Use Scripture as an invitation to reflect, not as a closing argument. The passages below belong in pastoral conversation, homily resources, retreat materials, and written reflections, not in solicitation letters, where a verse functions as pressure no matter how gently it's set.

The reason to know them is diagnostic. Different donors are standing in different places, and the tradition has language for each place.

Note that David frames his own giving as delight rather than duty, he gives because of the delight he takes in the house of his God (1 Chr 29:3). And note the qualifier Paul attaches to generosity: without sadness or compulsion. A legacy gift made from freedom is a different object than one made from guilt, and Scripture says so plainly enough that you don't need to.

Two working rules. First, if you aren't trained in scriptural interpretation, partner with your pastor, chaplain, or mission leader before a passage goes into donor communications, and have a priest or deacon review anything you write that touches judgment, the communion of saints, or the last things. Second, paraphrase and cite chapter and verse rather than reproducing translation text; linking readers to the passage on the USCCB site is cleaner and avoids permissions questions entirely.

What does this actually change in your practice?

Four things, concretely.

• Move planned giving inside stewardship formation. If your parish or school already preaches time, talent, and treasure, legacy giving is the fourth verb of a definition your people have already heard. Teach it there, not in a separate campaign.
• Change the first question you ask. Not "would you consider a bequest?" but "how do you want what you've built here to continue?" The first invites a yes or no. The second invites a conversation.
• Move tax to the second half. When a donor asks, and they will, answer accurately, then refer them to their attorney. Efficiency is a real service. It's just not the reason.
• Prepare gratitude the way you prepare data. Three specific things, named before you walk in. This is the cheapest preparation in fundraising and the most frequently skipped.

None of this requires theological training. It requires deciding, in advance, which vision of the donor you're bringing into the room, because you can only bring one. For where this fits in a full program, vehicles, launch sequence, legacy society, gift acceptance, start with our complete guide to Catholic planned giving.

Frequently asked questions

Isn't it manipulative to bring faith into a planned giving conversation?

It's manipulative to bring faith in as a lever, to imply that a gift is what fidelity requires. It isn't manipulative to speak the donor's own language about their own money. Most Catholic donors already think about wealth in terms of stewardship. Refusing to name that isn't neutrality; it's just less honest.

Should we ever mention tax benefits at all?

Yes, at the right moment. Tax efficiency is real, and a donor deciding between assets deserves accurate information, a retirement account left to heirs is reduced by the income tax they'll owe on distributions, while the same account left to a tax-exempt organization isn't. That's a genuine service. It belongs after the decision to give, not before it, and it always ends with a referral to the donor's own advisor.

What do I say when a donor tells me they need to leave everything to their children?

Agree with them, and mean it. Then note that a residuary gift or a beneficiary designation lets them provide fully for family and still include the mission, because those structures pay family first or draw on an asset outside the will entirely. Let the donor's attorney work out the specifics.

Can we put a Scripture verse in a planned giving letter?

In a solicitation, a verse can read as pressure regardless of intent. Scripture does its best work in reflections, bulletin columns, homily resources, and legacy society materials, settings where the reader isn't being asked for anything.

Does this framing work on donors who aren't practicing Catholics?

Often, yes, because gratitude and legacy aren't sectarian ideas. What changes is the vocabulary. With a lapsed or non-Catholic donor who loves your school or your ministry, lead with what the mission has meant to them and what they want continued.

Where does planned giving fit alongside our annual appeal?

On the same continuum, not in competition with it. Annual giving is the weekly habit of returning a portion; a legacy gift is the same disposition applied to everything at once. In practice, your best legacy prospects are long-tenured annual donors, not your largest single-gift donors. Consistency signals the formed steward better than size does.

This article is written for fundraising professionals and does not constitute legal or tax advice. Donors considering any planned gift involving estate documents, trust agreements, or beneficiary designations should consult a qualified estate planning attorney. Organizations should consult their own counsel and their diocesan development office before accepting complex gifts.