The grants were announced by Sister Andr e Fries, a Sister of the Most Precious Blood of O'Fallon, Missouri, and head of the Retirement Office. Grants were approved by the office's Management Board, which includes representatives of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Conference of Major Superiors of Men and the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious. Funding comes from an annual collection taken up in parishes each December to offset the retirement liability of priests, brothers and sisters in religious orders. The retirement needs of the orders in the United States, which is in the billions of dollars, became apparent in the mid-1980s, leading to a collection which is the best supported regular collection from Catholics in the nation. Basic Grants are based on need, calculated by a formula based on the national weighted average cost of care and the adjusted assets of the institutes.
Many institutes have higher or lower costs than the national average.
However, the institute has 932 members of whom 596, or sixty-three percent, are age 70 or older. Eighty-nine of these Sisters are in skilled care facilities and 94 more are in assisted living facilities. Their primary ministry of the institute continues to be education in Catholic schools, where in the past they worked under a stipend model which did not allow for resources for retirement. Today, they work to further lower their cost of care and to increase revenues. The institute recently received a Special Assistance Grant to develop a program to refine their planning for future retirement needs.