Posted on 08/19/2026 2:34:08 PM PDT by ebb tide
On 18 August 2026, Pope Leo XIV appointed twelve new consultors to the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. Leo XIV fills the Vatican's social-policy apparatus with mostly anti-Catholic figures.
1. Peter G. Kirchschläger, 49, Social ethicist, University of Lucerne, Switzerland
In December 2018, he said that the Catholic Church has an unresolved human-rights problem regarding the impossibility of women's ordination to the priesthood. He even claimed that the state "may not look away" but has an obligation to press the Church on it. When presented with the argument that women dissatisfied with Catholic teaching can leave, he answered: “That would be protecting the perpetrator.”
2. Kathryn A. Koch, 45, Wall Street Finance
Kathryn Koch spent 20 years at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, became a Goldman partner and ran its approximately $300 billion public-equity business.
In 2015, Koch was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
Since 2024, Koch has served on the board of Nasdaq, where she also sits on the committee overseeing executive compensation.
3. Paolo Foglizzo, 61, Eitor at Jesuit-founded journal ‘Aggiornamenti Sociali’, Italy
Foglizzo was a participant at both the 2018 Youth Synod and the 2023–24 Synod on Synodality. He participated in the April 2023 working group preparing the Instrumentum laboris.
He argued in many articles for a “change of structures and institutions in a synodal way”. And: “The Church feels called to be a space of inclusion without barriers to entry.”
In 2021, he said that “getting vaccinated” is “a duty of fraternity” and an ethical responsibility for the common good.
4. Joseph Jeyaraj Swaminathan SDB, Indian priest, Salesian Pontifical University in Rome
Swaminathan’s 2021 co-authored study positively presents elements of Indian spirituality as resources for understanding human flourishing, including Atman, Brahman, Dharma and the three gunas - Sattva, Rajas and Tamas.
He describes as an “ultimate truth” of Advaita Vedanta that the human spirit (Atman) becomes the same as the divine spirit (Brahman). Furthermore, he stated that the “ultimate goal of all humans is to realise this oneness.”
The study calls the Indian transcendental perspective the “highest form of well-being,” describes Indian spirituality as leading to awareness of “the Sacred” and “connectedness with the divine,” and discusses yoga, meditation and prayer as recommended spiritual practices.
5. Peter Klasvogt, 68, German priest, rector of the Campo Santo Teutonico
After the manipulative German abuse study, Rev. Klasvogt called structural Church reform “absolutely necessary,” focusing on power, sexual morality and priesthood. Though not a voting member of the German Synod, he supported the process and later urged: “Dare more synodality!”
In the 2022 book Riskierte Berufung, Rev. Klasvogt argues that “in heaven there will no longer be priests, at least not by virtue of office.”
He says the Church can develop new ministries for men and women, even with “laying on of hands and prayer,” and suggests that historical forms of female “quasi-episcopal powers” could be revived in modified form. In the introduction he co-authored, Klasvogt and his co-authors state that the Church’s concepts of women, priesthood, the body and sexual morality must be reviewed “with a willingness to change.”
6. Clemens Sedmak, 55, Austrian lay-theologian, teaching at Notre Dame, Indiana
At a 2025 video, Sedmak called for parishes to welcome homosexual couples “with their forms of life”. He praised the “fidelity” in such relationships and that couples “remain together” through adversity.
Sedmak also approvingly described accommodation of transgender students at Notre Dame, so that they “feel welcome.”
On divorced and remarried Catholics, Sedmak invoked Amoris Laetitia and gave the example of a devout Catholic man whose wife left him after 34 years of marriage and who is now entering a new relationship with another woman. The man would thereby enter an “irregular situation”. Sedmak stressed mercy and the uniqueness of his situation, saying “the ideal is a lighthouse, not a tribunal.” When addressing the need to “hold fast to the truth,” he cited Bruno Forte: truth is not something Christians possess, but “someone who possesses us.”
7. Emmanuel Katongole, 65, Ugandan priest, Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana
Katongole argues that Christianity must “rediscover and build on the religious heritage of Africa’s primal religions.”
He says he is rediscovering “the rich resources of African native spiritualities” and advocates reconnecting “with God, with one another, and with the Earth.” After his birth, his umbilical cord was buried on his family’s ancestral land because “within African cosmology, whoever is living is connected to the world of the ancestors.”
He welcomed Pope Francis’s connection between indigenous culture and ecology.
8. Lucy Afandi Esipila, Kenya
Lucy Esipila has been an outspoken advocate of the UN’s Agenda 2030: in 2020 she claimed for Caritas Africa that the Church had “embraced the objectives” of the Sustainable Development Goals and described efforts to mobilize Caritas’s network of 372 dioceses and 15,000 parishes to accelerate Agenda 2030.
In a 2025 Caritas Africa statement signed by Esipila, she advocated debt cancellation so governments could increase spending on women, including “improving reproductive health services”. The statement also demanded reform of the “Global Financial Architecture” and a comprehensive UN Debt Framework.
More broadly, Esipila has promoted a strongly redistributive economic agenda, including progressive taxation, universal free public health and education, anti-discrimination measures, and reform of the international financial architecture.
9. Caren Rodrigues, Indian
She is deeply involved in Pope Francis’s Economy of Francesco movement, which seeks a “new global economic model” centered on the environment, workers and justice for the poor. Selected as one of its original delegates and “Life Economists,” she became an EoF Academy Research Fellow, India-hub representative/research coordinator and, in 2024, one of only 34 members of its Assembly of Representatives, meeting Francis in Rome.
10. Omer S. Combary, Burkina Faso
Omer Souglimpo Combary is a Burkinabè professor of Development Economics. His recent work is closely aligned with the global agenda of climate change and sustainable development goals.
Omer Combary served as one of only two primary investigators of the World Bank-funded 2018 Burkina Faso baseline survey for the Sahel Women Empowerment and Demographic Dividend (SWEDD) initiative. SWEDD was not simply a poverty survey. The World Bank describes the project as seeking to reduce gender disparities by “enhancing access to reproductive health information and contraception”.
11. Francesco Coluccia, 53, Italian priest, exorcist, psychologist and bioethisicist
His record is pro-life: he has worked closely with Italy's Movimento per la Vita, led prayer at its 2025 Vatican gathering, published a 2026 book through the movement, and argues for the sacredness and dignity of human life from beginning to end.
12. Jacqueline Remond, Australian
Remond works at Australian Catholic University on Integral Ecology.
In 2006 she trained with Al Gore as a “Climate Change Leader” and subsequently presented Gore's climate-change presentation around the Kimberley region of Australia. She was National Director of Catholic Earthcare Australia from 2007–2017 and was a co-founder of the Global Catholic Climate Movement, now called the Laudato Si’ Movement.
She is one of the clearest Francis-era continuity appointments. Her public record is overwhelmingly about climate policy, Laudato si’, “ecological conversion,” and embedding environmental action throughout Catholic institutions.
Remond promotes a sacralized ecological spirituality. In a 2023 Vatican News interview, she called Christians into “kinship with water,” spoke of hearing water “crying” and “singing,” urged people to “sing out that song together with water,” and described humanity as entering “sublime communion” with creation, concluding: “God is in all of this.”
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11. Francesco Coluccia, 53, Italian priest, exorcist, psychologist and bioethisicist
His record is pro-life: he has worked closely with Italy's Movimento per la Vita, led prayer at its 2025 Vatican gathering, published a 2026 book through the movement, and argues for the sacredness and dignity of human life from beginning to end.
Ping
Someone should start a movement to relocate the Vatican to Texas, or Florida, or maybe build a Catholic version of the Vatican in a Red State.
World Enslavement Forum
“Pope Leo XIV appointed twelve new consultors to the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.” Don’t know what that is Ebb, that ‘integral’ stuff.
“Integral Human Development” is code for Communism.
Hmm, what if some of them don't want to become priests?
That is an organizational bloat word salad. The Vatican appears to be in an advanced state of bureaucratic rot.
80% of the benefits of religion comes from 20% of the effort. Nothing holy is likely to come out of "Integral Human Development" 80% bureaucratic rot.
Save
Interesting that not one word is referenced to Christ’s Teachings regarding his Church. Most references are to Francis and Leo or some popular author/activist. Maybe its an oversight by not mentioning their church.
“Interesting that not one word is referenced to Christ’s Teachings regarding his Church.”
That would require cracking open a Bible, and “they” just don’t do that.
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