Canadian university launches new Institute dedicated to Pope Francis
St Jerome’s University in Ontario announced the creation of a Pope Francis Institute to preserve the late Pope’s legacy. The institute will offer courses, lectures and formation programmes based on Pope Francis’s magisterium. It is described as the first institute of its kind worldwide. President Dr Peter Meehan highlighted Pope Francis’s pastoral instincts, focus on migration, environment and outreach to all people. The institute’s mission is to keep Pope Francis’s legacy alive in Canada and beyond.
5 months ago
The Pope Francis Institute, announced by St Jerome’s University in Ontario, will preserve and promote the pastoral and intellectual legacy of the late Pope Francis through academic courses, dialogues, and outreach programs, while also reflecting the synodal emphasis of his successor, Pope Leo XIV 1.
St Jerome’s University, a Catholic institution, is creating what it calls the world’s first “Pope Francis Institute.”
The institute is slated to open later in 2026 and will be housed on the university’s campus 1.
The institute’s purpose is to keep Pope Francis’s legacy alive by offering courses, lectures, and formation programmes rooted in his magisterium 1.
Planned offerings include a Certificate in Catholic Leadership, dialogues, conferences, spiritual retreats, and eventually full‑time research fellows 1.
President Dr Peter Meehan emphasizes that the institute should serve both the Church and the broader public, aiming to attract non‑Catholics as well 1.
Meehan notes that the momentum for the institute has been reinforced by Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate, which highlights synodality and the implementation of the Second Vatican Council 1.
These themes echo Pope Francis’s own focus and will shape the institute’s activities once it opens 1.
When operational, the institute intends to extend its impact beyond academia, likening a Catholic university’s role to that of a Catholic hospital—serving the world outside its walls 1.
It will host international dialogues and aim to become a hub for research on migration, the environment, and inclusive outreach, reflecting the priorities of Pope Francis 1.*
Evaluate how Pope Francis’s magisterium reshapes Catholic engagement with migration, environment, and outreach
Pope Francis’s magisterium reshapes Catholic engagement with migration, the environment, and outreach by insisting on an “integral” vision: human dignity, social realities, and creation are interconnected, and the Church’s response must be pastoral, fraternal, and mission-driven, not merely managerial or ideological.
A defining feature of Francis’s teaching is that environmental concern is never treated as a self-contained “green” agenda. He explicitly rejects that reduction: caring for creation is “not simply a ‘green’… attitude,” but “an attitude of human ecology,” where humanity and creation are reciprocally influential.
In Laudato Si’, Francis frames ecological crisis as inseparable from moral and cultural disorder. The world cannot be analyzed as if environment were only one aspect among others; “the book of nature is one and indivisible,” including “life, sexuality, the family, social relations, and so forth.” He therefore ties ecological deterioration to the “culture which shapes human coexistence,” and ultimately to a shared root: the loss of recognition of higher truths that orient freedom.
Francis also blocks a common failure: treating environmental protection as compatible with indifference to human suffering. He states plainly that genuine communion with creation “cannot be real if our hearts lack tenderness, compassion and concern for our fellow human beings.” He warns that it is inconsistent to combat trafficking in endangered species while remaining indifferent to trafficking and harm done to human beings.
Evaluation: This reshapes Catholic engagement by converting environmental advocacy into an explicit moral theology of solidarity: the Church’s environmental voice becomes human-rights-centered, and its social voice becomes creationally responsible.
Francis repeatedly links migration to environmental neglect and to economic or technological systems that degrade both jobs and communities.
In his 2015 address to city leaders, Francis identifies urban expansion, poverty belts, and environmental neglect as intertwined realities—and he explicitly says that “the phenomenon of migration is included in this sense.” He asks why people come to slums and favelas, answering: because “the rural world doesn’t offer them opportunities.”
In the same address, Francis names “the idolatry of technocracy” and ties it to the destruction of jobs and unemployment, which then “people are forced to emigrate.” This means migration is not framed merely as a legal or security challenge, but as a consequence of distorted models of development that harm human work and livelihoods.
Evaluation: Francis’s approach reshapes Catholic engagement by treating migration causes as structural and moral, not solely individual misfortune or purely border-state decisions. That pushes Catholic discourse away from short-term crisis management and toward conversions in development, labor, and governance.
Francis’s magisterium also reshapes Catholic outreach by emphasizing the Church’s missionary posture: go out, encounter, welcome, and integrate.
In Evangelii Gaudium, Francis calls for a Church that is “out on the streets” rather than “confined and from clinging to its own security.” He prefers “a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets” to one that preserves comfort by remaining inward.
The reason is ecclesial and Christological: many live without “friendship with Jesus Christ,” without a “community of faith,” without “meaning and a goal in life,” while Christ asks concrete charity: “Give them something to eat.”
Francis grounds outreach in the “social dimension of evangelization.” He teaches that it is “essential to draw near” to new forms of poverty and vulnerability, naming “refugees” and “migrants,” who present “a particular challenge” since the Church sees herself as “a mother to all” and a Church “without frontiers.”
He therefore exhorts countries to “a generous openness” that integrates difference as a “new factor of development,” and he even describes cities designed to “connect, relate and favour the recognition of others.”
Evaluation: Catholic outreach, in Francis’s vision, becomes less about defensive identity-protection and more about building communal conditions where newcomers can actually become part of social life—so that evangelization and social integration reinforce one another.
Francis does not reject order or governance; he insists that genuine order must be rooted in human dignity.
In a 2019 general audience, Francis reports that, in Morocco, he offered the Holy See’s contribution summarized in “four verbs: to welcome migrants, to protect migrants, to promote migrants and to integrate migrants.” He emphasizes that this is not “welfare programs from the top down,” but “a journey together… to build cities and countries” that preserve identity while remaining open to difference and committed to human fraternity.
In his 2018 Mass for migrants, Francis insists that “the only reasonable response” is solidarity and mercy—“not… calculations,” but an “equitable distribution of responsibilities,” “an honest and sincere assessment of the alternatives,” and “a prudent management.”
A key line is his definition of a just policy: it is “at the service of the person, of every person involved,” ensuring “security, respect for the rights and dignity of all,” while considering the good of one’s own country in an “ever more interconnected world.”
In 2025, Francis addresses bishops in the United States with a high standard for legality: an authentic rule of law is verified by “the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized.”
He adds an important balance: this “does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration,” but such policies cannot be built through “the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others.”
Evaluation: Francis reshapes engagement by integrating three dimensions that are often split: mercy (solidarity and humane welcome), policy (orderly and legal regulation), and dignity (the moral test for law).
Francis also reshapes outreach in style. Mission is not primarily bureaucratic; it is relational and spiritual.
In a 2015 homiletic context, Francis states that mission is “never the fruit of a perfectly planned program or a well-organized manual.” Rather, “mission is always the fruit of a life which knows what it is to be found and healed, encountered and forgiven.”
In 2024, he instructs pastors: “Listen to others, be close to them,” and “Encounter people where they live and work; that is important.”
Evaluation: This changes Catholic engagement by making the Church’s public witness less dependent on technique and more on proximity, accompaniment, and the ability to recognize Christ in the suffering neighbor—especially relevant to migrants experiencing “solitude and abandonment” and “existential displacement.”
Francis’s environmental teaching and migration teaching converge in the same theological logic: everything is connected, and fraternity must expand until it includes both people far away and creation itself.
He teaches in Laudato Si’ that concern for the environment needs “to be joined to a sincere love for our fellow human beings and an unwavering commitment to resolving the problems of society.” And earlier, he insists that the degradation of nature and the social environment share “the same evil.”
In Fratelli Tutti, Francis returns to Saint Francis of Assisi and the call to love the brother “as much when he is far away… as when he is with him,” and he frames the whole document as building “universal fraternity” grounded in dignity.
Evaluation: The reshaping here is not only policy-oriented but civilizational: Catholic engagement becomes a coherent witness that the same moral conversion governs how Catholics relate to migrants, to the poor, to society, and to the earth.
Pope Francis reshapes Catholic engagement by moving from isolated agendas to an integral anthropology and integral ecology: environmental neglect is tied to distorted economic systems and to human vulnerability, producing conditions that drive migration; outreach to migrants and the poor is therefore not merely compassionate but part of the Church’s evangelizing mission as a “mother to all.” His magisterium consistently unites welcome with protection, order with dignity, environmental care with human tenderness, and mission with encounter rather than with fear, walls, or purely technical solutions.