Integral — But to What End? Leo XIV Consolidates the Francis-Era Human-Development Project
Pope Leo XIV’s appointment of twelve new consultors to the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development might easily pass as another item of Vatican personnel news. It should not. Coming less than two months after Leo installed a new leadership drawn substantially from within the existing Francis-era structure, the appointments provide another useful indication of where continuity, rather than rupture, is becoming visible in the new pontificate. The issue is not whether Catholics should care about poverty, migration, peace, health, economic justice or the created order. Catholic social doctrine requires precisely such concern. The more fundamental question is what makes human development truly “integral”. For the Church, the answer cannot simply mean addressing more dimensions of earthly existence. It means understanding the whole man according to the whole truth about man — created by God, fallen, redeemed by Christ, governed by the natural and divine law, possessing an immortal soul and called ultimately not merely to human flourishing but to eternal life.
On 18 August Pope Leo XIV appointed twelve consultors to the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. Among them are two academics from the University of Notre Dame: Fr Emmanuel Katongole, Professor of Theology and Peace Studies, and Clemens Sedmak, Professor of Social Ethics and Director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. The remaining appointments encompass clergy, economists, academics, healthcare specialists and Caritas personnel from several continents.¹ Nothing about appointing specialists to advise a Vatican department is remarkable in itself. What makes this particular list worth examining is the intellectual and institutional direction in which it points.
The appointments follow Leo XIV’s significant restructuring of the Dicastery’s leadership on 30 June. Sister Alessandra Smerilli FMA, until then its Secretary, was promoted to Prefect; Cardinal Fabio Baggio CS became Pro-Prefect with particular responsibility for the Laudato Si’ Higher Education Centre; and Mgr Jozef Barlaš was named Secretary. Their appointments take effect on 1 September.² The significance lies not primarily in their sex, nationality or canonical status, but in the unmistakable continuity involved. Leo did not bring in a team from outside to redirect one of Pope Francis’s characteristic Curial projects. He elevated figures already embedded within it and preserved a specific institutional commitment to the Laudato Si’ programme.
That does not by itself constitute a criticism. But appointments are among the clearest ways in which a pontiff reveals his governing priorities. Papal style can be ambiguous. Ceremonial gestures can be over-read. A phrase in an interview may be interpreted in half a dozen ways. Personnel is harder to explain away. A pope governs through the people whom he appoints, confirms, promotes and entrusts with the practical implementation of policy. If one wants to know whether Leo XIV intends fundamentally to reverse the institutional trajectory of the Francis pontificate, therefore, it is increasingly necessary to look beyond aesthetic signals and examine whom he is putting in charge.
Fr Emmanuel Katongole represents a particularly clear continuity with Francis’s programme of “integral ecology”. Notre Dame identifies his interests as political theology, reconciliation, global Catholicism, environmental ethics and peace studies. He is also founder and President of the Bethany Land Institute in Uganda, whose work explicitly seeks to realise the “vision, spirituality and practice” of Laudato Si’.³ Notre Dame describes the Institute as combining regenerative agriculture, entrepreneurship and ecological restoration within an explicitly Catholic spirituality; Katongole himself has repeatedly connected its work with Francis’s insistence that the “cry of the earth” and the “cry of the poor” must be heard together.⁴
There is nothing intrinsically objectionable in any of that. On the contrary, Catholic civilisation has always understood that stewardship of land, just economic relations, the dignity of labour, care for the poor and prudent use of material resources belong within the moral order. A farmer restoring exhausted soil, a religious institution enabling poor families to support themselves or a Catholic school teaching responsible stewardship of creation is not abandoning the Gospel by doing so. The false choice between supernatural religion and practical charity is itself profoundly un-Catholic.
But the distinction which must be preserved is equally important: Christianity is not sustainable development with sacramental decoration.
The Church was not founded to become the spiritual department of the international development sector. Our Lord did not commission the Apostles merely to improve social indicators. He commanded them to teach all nations, to baptise, to preach repentance and remission of sins, to administer the mysteries of grace and to bring men into communion with God. The Church feeds the hungry because Christ commands charity; she defends the poor because justice is a moral obligation; she protects human dignity because man bears the image of God. Her social doctrine is not an autonomous humanitarian programme existing alongside her supernatural mission. It proceeds from that mission because it proceeds from the truth about man.
That is precisely what integral ought to mean.
Paul VI gave the classic formulation in Populorum Progressio: authentic development must concern “each man and the whole man”. He immediately located that development within God’s design, insisting that every human life is a vocation and that human fulfilment cannot be separated from the Creator. He rejected a humanism closed upon itself and cut off from God.⁵ Benedict XVI subsequently made the theological principle still more explicit in Caritas in Veritate. Integral human development, he taught, requires a transcendent vision of the person; without God, development either collapses or becomes a project in which man imagines that he can manufacture his own salvation. Benedict’s conclusion was characteristically uncompromising: **“A humanism which excludes God is an inhuman humanism.”**⁶
That sentence supplies the standard by which any Vatican programme of “integral human development” should be judged.
The adjective cannot simply mean that a dicastery concerns itself simultaneously with economics, ecology, migration, peace, healthcare, artificial intelligence and labour. A programme could embrace every one of those subjects and still offer a radically incomplete account of man. Catholic anthropology is “integral” because it refuses to amputate either dimension of human existence: nature and grace, body and soul, temporal responsibility and supernatural destiny. Benedict explicitly taught that the Christian vocation to development concerns both the natural and the supernatural orders.⁶
Thus a policy may be economically sophisticated, environmentally sustainable, socially inclusive and internationally applauded while remaining anthropologically defective. If it cannot speak of original sin, objective moral truth, the natural law, marriage and the family, personal responsibility, conversion, redemption, grace and man’s eternal end, it has not yet reached “the whole man”. It may describe his conditions. It has not explained his nature.
It is in this context that the appointment of Clemens Sedmak deserves particular attention. Again, precision is essential. Sedmak should not be accused of doctrinal dissent merely because his academic vocabulary is unfamiliar to some Catholics or because his work engages closely with Pope Francis. His scholarship is concerned with Catholic social ethics, poverty, justice and human dignity. But one of his books bears a title which makes its relevance to the present discussion unmistakable: A Church of the Poor: Pope Francis and the Transformation of Orthodoxy.⁷
Sedmak’s argument is not the crude proposition that doctrine simply does not matter. On the contrary, his treatment acknowledges what he calls “propositional orthodoxy”: doctrines formulated as propositions and received as true upon the authority of the Church. Such orthodoxy is indispensable. His contention is rather that it is insufficient by itself. Orthodoxy must also be existential; it must become discipleship, relationship, practice and solidarity, particularly with the poor.⁸
So far, there need be no disagreement. The Epistle of St James settled the question long before modern theology acquired the term orthopraxy: faith without works is dead. A Catholic who can define charity but refuses to practise it has not attained holiness. The Saints did not merely subscribe intellectually to propositions; they conformed their lives to the truths those propositions expressed.
The difficulty begins when the relationship between truth and experience is reversed.
A sympathetic academic review of Sedmak’s book describes his account as an “orthodoxy in a new key”, in which the poor become teachers and evangelisers and in which lived encounter can alter what the reviewer calls the Church’s “epistemic situation”. The same review goes further, characterising the orthodoxy emerging from this approach as dynamic, fluid and continually renegotiated as the Church encounters lived reality.⁷ A more critical scholarly review interprets Sedmak as attempting to shift orthodoxy away from correct propositional belief and towards proper relationships, discipleship and identification with the economically poor.⁹
Those are reviewers’ assessments and should be identified as such. They are not licence to attribute every formulation directly to Sedmak. But they expose the question his work raises and which his Vatican appointment makes ecclesially relevant: does lived experience illuminate the application of revealed truth, or does lived experience acquire the capacity to renegotiate what orthodoxy itself means?
Catholicism can accept only the former.
The poor may reveal our hypocrisy. The persecuted may expose our cowardice. The abandoned mother may force us to confront the inadequacy of comfortable abstractions. A refugee, a prisoner, a starving child or a family destroyed by economic exploitation may oblige us to recognise dimensions of moral responsibility we have ignored. Experience can deepen understanding and correct defective prudential judgements.
But experience does not constitute revelation.
The deposit of faith is received, not manufactured. Moral truth does not become false when it proves pastorally difficult. Human nature does not alter because contemporary consciousness experiences it differently. Doctrine may develop organically in its expression and understanding, but reality does not sit in judgement upon revelation as though successive human experiences supplied amendments to what God has disclosed.
Here the relevance to the broader Francis-era ecclesial project becomes obvious. One of the recurring ambiguities of the past decade has been the employment of words capable of bearing perfectly Catholic meanings — discernment, accompaniment, inclusion, synodality, lived experience, peripheries, integral ecology — while allowing their practical operation to become considerably more elastic. None of those words is objectionable in itself. The problem arises when the governing movement becomes not truth faithfully applied to circumstances, but circumstances gradually determining how truth may be stated, received or enforced.
Integral human development is vulnerable to precisely the same inversion.
The Church certainly has something to say about climate, migration, poverty, economics, war, technology and international cooperation. But she does not approach those subjects empty-handed, waiting for contemporary policy specialists to provide conclusions which theology subsequently baptises. She brings a prior account of the human person, society, authority, property, family, justice, subsidiarity, solidarity, sin, virtue, freedom and the common good. Catholic social doctrine judges political programmes. Political programmes do not supply the axioms from which Catholic social doctrine is reconstructed.
Benedict XVI explicitly warned against this reduction. The Church, he wrote, possesses no technical solutions of her own to impose upon states. Her proper contribution is a mission of truth: a vision of man, his dignity and his vocation capable of judging and directing human action.⁶ That is considerably more demanding than converting Vatican departments into ecclesiastical NGOs. An NGO can advocate policy. The Church must first tell the world what man is.
And this is why Leo XIV’s appointments matter.
A consultor is not a prefect. A consultor does not exercise the Pope’s magisterium. Appointment to a dicastery certainly does not transform every academic opinion of the person appointed into Catholic doctrine. But consultors exist to advise. They help frame questions, supply expertise and influence the conceptual environment within which an institution thinks. Personnel therefore need not issue decrees to affect direction. Institutions acquire priorities partly through the people from whom they habitually seek advice.
The cumulative picture is becoming difficult to dismiss. In Smerilli, Baggio, Katongole, Sedmak and the structures surrounding the Laudato Si’ Higher Education Centre, Leo XIV is not dismantling the Francis-era human-development architecture. He is presently staffing it, promoting within it and supplying it with new consultors whose expertise largely inhabits its established intellectual world.¹ ²
That does not tell us everything about Leo XIV. Nor does it prove that his pontificate will simply reproduce that of Francis. But Catholics who wish to understand the new Pope should weigh acts of government more heavily than gestures onto which competing constituencies can project their hopes. The Roman Curia is one of the principal instruments through which a Pope gives practical form to his priorities. Appointments are therefore evidence.
The decisive test of this Dicastery will not be whether it speaks about poverty. Of course it should. Nor whether it speaks about migrants, warfare, environmental degradation, unjust economic structures or the exploitation of workers. Catholic social doctrine obliges the Church to address them.
The test will be whether its vision is truly integral.
Will the unborn child appear as prominently in its conception of human dignity as the migrant? Will the natural family be treated as indispensable to human development rather than as one social arrangement among others? Will subsidiarity accompany solidarity? Will duties accompany rights? Will objective moral law constrain policy? Will creation be defended as creation rather than merely “environment”? Will poverty be understood not only materially but spiritually? Will the Dicastery recognise that a society can become richer and nevertheless become less human; more inclusive according to prevailing political terminology and yet more hostile to human nature; technologically advanced and spiritually barbarous?
Above all, will it remember what Benedict XVI insisted was essential: that man cannot finally understand himself without God?
A Church that plants trees performs a good work. A Church that feeds the hungry obeys Christ. A Church that defends refugees may act courageously. A Church that exposes economic exploitation serves justice. But the Church must also plant the Cross. She must feed men with the Bread of Life. She must tell the refugee that he possesses not merely human rights but an immortal soul. She must tell rich and poor alike that both will stand before God. She must preach repentance alongside reconciliation, salvation alongside solidarity and eternal life alongside human flourishing.
Otherwise “integral human development” becomes a paradox: a programme broad enough to encompass almost everything about man except the reason for which man exists.
Leo XIV inherited the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development from Francis. He has now chosen its senior leadership and begun choosing those who will advise it. It is therefore increasingly insufficient to speak simply of an inherited Francis-era institution. It is becoming Leo XIV’s institution too.
The question is no longer whether he will inherit this project.
He has.
The question is what he intends to make of it.
And the measure must remain the Catholic meaning of the word placed at the centre of its title: integral — every man and the whole man, nature and grace, earth and Heaven, temporal good and eternal destiny, the human person understood finally in Jesus Christ.
Anything less may constitute development.
It is not yet integral.
¹ Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, “The Holy Father appoints new Consultors to the Dicastery,” 18 August 2026.
² L’Osservatore Romano, “New Leaders in Two Dicasteries,” 6 July 2026; Holy See appointments announced 30 June 2026.
³ University of Notre Dame, Department of Theology, “Emmanuel Katongole.”
⁴ University of Notre Dame, “Restoring God’s Creation”; Notre Dame Global, “What does it look like to live ‘Laudato Si’’? You can see it in rural Uganda.”
⁵ Paul VI, Encyclical Populorum Progressio, 14–15, 42, 26 March 1967.
⁶ Benedict XVI, Encyclical Caritas in Veritate, 11, 16–18, 29, 78, 29 June 2009.
⁷ Clemens Sedmak, A Church of the Poor: Pope Francis and the Transformation of Orthodoxy, Orbis Books, 2016; Mark S. Medley, review, Reading Religion, 20 April 2017.
⁸ John A. Coleman SJ, “A Theology that Weeps,” America, 7 March 2017.
⁹ Andrew J. Spencer, review of Clemens Sedmak, A Church of the Poor, Journal of Markets & Morality, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring 2017.
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