- Cindy Wooden (Vatican City, Catholic News Service). Renzo Pegoraro has been appointed by Pope Leo XIV as president of the Pontifical Academy for Life. He had been chancellor of the Academy since 2011. He succeeds Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who reached the mandatory retirement age of 80 in April.
In an interview with the Italian newspaper 'La Stampa' on May 26, Archbishop Paglia said that he submitted his resignation to Pope Francis when he turned 75, in accordance with canon law. But that the Pope asked him to stay on until he turned 80.
The appointment of Renzo Pegoraro was announced by the Vatican on May 27. A week earlier, the Vatican announced that Pope Leo had appointed the Cardinal Baldassare Reina to succeed the Archbishop Paglia as Grand Chancellor of the John Paul II Theological Institute for the Sciences of Marriage and the Family.
Defense and promotion of the value of human life
Pope Francis updated the statutes of the Pontifical Academy for Life in 2016. At that time, the Pope said that the primary goal of the Academy, founded in 1994 by St. John Paul II, would continue to be "the defense and promotion of the value of human life and the dignity of the person."
The new statutes added, however, that achieving the goal would include studying ways to promote "care for the dignity of the human person in the different ages of existence" as well as "mutual respect between genders and generations, the defense of the dignity of every human being. And likewise, "the promotion of a quality of human life that integrates its material and spiritual value in view of an authentic "human ecology". An ecology that "helps to restore the original balance of creation between the human person and the entire universe.
Pegoraro, a graduate in medicine and moral theology.
Renzo Pegoraro, who will be 66 years old on June 4, will be licgraduated in Medicine from the University of Padua (Italy) in 1985. Before that, he received a degree in Moral Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He was ordained a priest in 1989.
He earned an advanced degree in bioethics at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Italy and has taught bioethics at the Theological Faculty of Northern Italy. He has also served as secretary general of the Lanza Foundation of Padua, a center for studies in ethics, bioethics and environmental ethics. He taught care ethics at the Vatican-owned Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital in Rome. And he was president of the European Association of Medical Ethics Centers from 2010 to 2013.
