Our North Star of Encounter

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As we celebrate the Jubilee Year of Hope proclaimed by Pope Francis, we mourn his loss, while embracing the new leadership of Pope Leo XIV.

Since its founding in 1983, the Institute has anchored its work in the enduring principles of Catholic social tradition, drawing deeply from the treasury of social encyclicals stretching from Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum novarum that addresses the conditions of the working class during the Industrial Revolution to Pope Francis’s 2020 Fratelli tutti that addresses the fragmentation of society during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I chose to take the name Leo XIV,” the new pope states, “mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic encyclical Rerum novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day,” Pope Leo XIV explains, “the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to

developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice, and labor.”

While welcoming Leo XIV’s papacy, the Institute remains deeply indebted to Pope Francis’s legacy. Emily Garvey, associate director of justice education at the Institute, states that “what we inherit from Pope Francis’s papacy is a treasure chest of ways to think, pray, and act that give birth to the gospel message of love and justice for all.” She identifies Francis’s emphasis on love, mercy, forgiveness, and encounter as the “North Star” of the Institute’s work.

At the Institute, we follow Francis’s example of learning from and working in proximity to all those who join in the pursuit of justice and human flourishing. At the same time, as with Leo XIV, we do this work by drawing deeply from the treasury of the Church’s social tradition in order to face the complex and ever-evolving challenges to justice and human dignity today.

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