Leo XIV’s Newest Appointments: WEF, Agenda 2030 and Women-Must-Become-Priests
On 18 August 2026, 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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