Pope names priest with medical degree president of Pontifical Academy for Life

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Leo XIV has named Father Renzo Pegoraro, a bioethicist who earned a medical degree before entering the seminary, to be the new president of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

Father Pegoraro, who had served as chancellor of the academy since 2011, succeeds Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who reached the mandatory retirement age of 80 in April.

In an interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa May 26, Archbishop Paglia said he had offered his resignation to Pope Francis when he turned 75, in accordance with canon law, but that the pope had asked him to stay on until he turned 80.

Father Pegoraro’s appointment was announced by the Vatican May 27. A week earlier, the Vatican announced that Pope Leo had named Cardinal Baldassare Reina to succeed Archbishop Paglia as grand chancellor of the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences.

Pope Francis updated the statutes of the Pontifical Academy for Life in 2016. At the time, the pope said the primary focus 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 “the care of the dignity of the human person at the different ages of existence, mutual respect between genders and generations, defense of the dignity of each human being, promotion of a quality of human life that integrates its material and spiritual value with a view to an authentic ‘human ecology’ that helps recover the original balance of creation between the human person and the entire universe.”

Father Pegoraro, who will celebrate his 66th birthday June 4, earned his medical degree from the University of Padua, Italy, in 1985 before earning a degree in moral theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1989.

He earned an advanced degree in bioethics from Italy’s Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and has taught bioethics at the Theological Faculty of Northern Italy and served as secretary-general of Padua’s Lanza Foundation, a center for studies in ethics, bioethics and environmental ethics. He taught nursing ethics at the Vatican-owned Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital in Rome and was president of the European Association of Centers for Medical Ethics from 2010 to 2013.