Faith and finances: why they were never separate.
I converted to Catholicism in 2025. I came to the Church skeptically with real biases I'd accumulated growing up in a Protestant tradition, and a desire to understand those biases well enough to defend them. I started reading. I started attending Mass. I started having conversations I hadn't expected. And somewhere in that process I stopped trying to win the argument and started experiencing something I couldn't explain away.
What changed for me wasn't primarily theological. It was vocational. I had been a financial advisor for years before the conversion. But after it, I understood what I was doing in a fundamentally different way. This work is stewardship now, not just professionally, but in a deeper sense that I find difficult to articulate without sounding like a brochure. Let me try to be concrete about it instead.
The framing that changed everything
The Catholic understanding of stewardship starts from Psalm 24:1: "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it." If that's true (and I believe it is) then the money a client has isn't ultimately theirs to do whatever they want with. It's entrusted to them. They're responsible for what they do with it in a way that extends beyond their own interests and timeline.
That's not a guilt framework. It's actually a freeing one. When you stop treating the accumulation of wealth as the primary objective and start treating it as stewardship of something entrusted to you for a purpose, the financial decisions change. The questions change. "How do I maximize this?" becomes "What is this actually for, and am I handling it in a way I can account for?"
I've found that clients who've been asked that question, especially clients who come from faith traditions that take stewardship seriously, respond with something that looks like relief. As if someone finally gave them permission to think about money as a tool for something rather than as an end in itself.
What this looks like in practice
The faith dimension shows up in three places in my work with clients.
First, in goal-setting. When I ask clients what they're trying to accomplish financially, the first answers are usually goals: retire at a certain age, pay off the house, fund college. But I also ask: what is all of this for? Who are you building this for? What do you want your money to make possible in the world beyond your own household? Those questions produce different answers than the first set, and the plan that emerges from them looks different too.
Second, in giving strategy. Charitable giving isn't an afterthought in a stewardship-oriented financial plan. It's a primary category. The USCCB investment guidelines, donor-advised funds, qualified charitable distributions, gifts of appreciated securities, these aren't edge cases. They're core planning tools for clients who take giving seriously. I spend meaningful time on this with every client who has giving goals, because how you give matters as much as how much you give.
Third, in investment philosophy. The CKA® designation I hold requires demonstrated integration of biblical principles into financial advice. For clients who want their portfolio to reflect their values, whether through USCCB-aligned screens or their own convictions about specific industries, the investment philosophy changes. This isn't a performance sacrifice; it's a different definition of what the portfolio is for.
The thing I'd tell someone skeptical of this
You don't have to share my faith to work with me. The clients I serve best share certain convictions regardless of religious background: that how you handle money says something about who you are, that accumulation isn't the point, that the plan should reflect what actually matters to you and not just what makes the number larger.
Faith shapes how I hold myself accountable and what standard I'm trying to meet. It's the reason I built a firm with a fiduciary obligation as the floor, not the ceiling. But it's not a requirement for the relationship.
What is a requirement is the willingness to think about money as a tool rather than a destination. If you've ever felt like there should be more to your financial plan than what you currently have: more integration, more intentionality, more honest accounting of what the money is actually doing, that's the conversation I want to have.
Curious what faith-integrated financial planning looks like?
It starts with a conversation about what the money is actually for.
This post is for educational purposes only and is not investment, tax, or legal advice. Integritas Wealth Strategies, LLC is a state-registered investment adviser in South Carolina.