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Towards a “Social Doctrine of the Mediterranean”

A Training-Forum organized by the Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation (FCAPP), in cooperation with the Cardinal Bea Centre for Judaic Studies of the Gregorian Pontifical University (Rome), the Catholic Institute of the Mediterranean (Marseilles) and the Antonianum Pontifical University (Rome).

To be launched on an experimental basis from October 2026 to June 2027

Goals and background: The Training-Forum draws inspiration from the Manifesto “For a Theology from the Mediterranean”, issued in Marseilles in September 2023, which calls for initiatives that “contribute to building networks between the Mediterranean Churches and to building a Mediterranean of peace”. We wish to stimulate better mutual information, dialogue and joint studying learning and research based on the theological and ethical foundations of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam and Christianity). It also builds on the document on Human Fraternity “For World Peace and Living Together”, cosigned by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmad al-Tayyeb in Abu Dhabi in February 2019, and on the Assisi Meetings of World Religions started by Pope St. John Paul II in 1986 in the city of St. Francis, of which this year marks the 40^th anniversary. Pope Leo XIV strongly supported this approach particularly in his visit to the Great Mosque of Algiers in April 2026 and in Barcelona in June 2026 on the occasion of Med26.

The Training Forum is both a training course with students and teachers and at the same time a Forum of mutual peer learning and studying in a multidisciplinary, multicultural and multireligious framework. The field of study covers the social economic and policy challenges of our age, the “Rerum Novarum” of to-day, as they apply to the Mediterranean and from the Mediterranean to the world. It was those fundamental changes in the heyday of the 19^th century industrial revolution and related conflicts that prompted Pope Leo XIII ‘s Encyclical “Rerum Novarum”, which started what we now call the Social Doctrine of the Church (SDC). Today we are experiencing a similar period of turbulent and deep structural change posing many challenging issues. They range from competitiveness and economic performance to employment and labor force participation, from poverty and income distribution to human rights and good governance, from technological change to the environmental and energy transitions underway, from peacebuilding to intercultural dialogue, etc.The Forumshould lead to more and better sharing of information knowledge and insights on the approaches to such problematique developed by the three universal religions of the Mediterranean, and their many significant common elements.

We refer to those common grounds as the “Social Doctrine of the Mediterranean”, because we rely on the important work of interreligious dialogue carried out by theologians and philosophers of the three religious traditions in the recent past. In the Catholic tradition, we speak of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church, i.e. the fundamental principles developed in the past and currently worked on that inspire Catholic Social Teaching (CST) on the issues concerning the economy, society and public policies. The goal of this initiative is to discuss how the other two main Mediterranean religions (Islam and Judaism) approach the “social issues” and the “Rerum Novarum”, i.e. the fundamental changes underway, and what principles have been developed in that context. The objectives of the Forum are basically informative, educational, and non-political. Naturally, the ultimate goal is, in line with the 2023 Manifesto, to lay the foundations for an informed rigorous and objective inter-religious dialogue that contributes to socio-economic and policy cooperation, and through that, to peace and development in a framework of religious freedom, tolerance, mutual respect and pluralism. But the Training Forum has more modest and pragmatic ambitions; it wishes to fill the knowledge gaps that divide the different approaches and point to the many elements of wisdom common to the three religions, which is a precondition for dialogue. This goal is -we believe- very important, because it promotes better mutual understanding, more tolerance and moderation, thereby undermining prejudice, fanaticism and radicalism that are often at the root of conflict and violence. We are convinced that, despite growing secularization and relativism in modern societies, religions have a lot to contribute to peaceful coexistence, cooperation and human development, in the “spirit of Assisi”, i.e. religious freedom, interreligious dialogue and universal brotherhood.

Even though the approach is multidisciplinary, the focus will be on social science, i.e. economics, sociology and public policies. The main speakers at the Webinars will be experts and scholars in social science that are knowledgeable in and inspired by the three religions. But great room will be given to discussion and exchange of views. The sessions will include not only talks and lectures, but also panels and possibly modern pedagogical tools and interactions.

Ultimately, we aim to build experience and expertise for launching in the future a fully-fledged School on the Social Doctrine of the Mediterranean (“School” in the Mediterranean sense of the word).

Steering Group and Partnerships: A Steering Group will be established to advise on the organization and the management of the Training Forum and coordinate the various activities. The Group will be chaired by Fr. Alexis Leproux, President of the Institut Catholique de la Mediterranée, and draw on experts coming from FCAPP, the Cardinal Bea Centre for Judaic Studies, the Gregorian Pontifical University, the Catholic Institute of the Mediterranean in Marseille, Oikos and the Antonianum Pontifical University, but also the College of Islamic Studies of the Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, the Association of Jewish Christian Friendship and other Jewish Communities/Universities, the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI), the Euro-Mediterranean Economists’ Association, think tanks, academics and other possible partners in the Mediterranean.

Title and Topics. The overarching theme of the Course is “Structural Change and Human Development in and from the Mediterranean”. We are seeing to-day unprecedented changes in the context that affect the economy, society, inter-regional intercultural and international relations. They concern technology (e.g. Artificial Intelligence), the labor market, industrial restructuring, demography, trade, the environment, social and cultural interactions, etc. How do we respond to those new (and often old) challenges? What needs to be done at the level of individual and local communities, regional and international organizations, business entities (both large conglomerates and SMEs), the private sector, public policymaking, the financial sector, NGOs, etc.?

The focus on human development is explained by the fact that economic prosperity, jobs and welfare are a necessary component of social and institutional stability and a strong driver of individual and collective engagement and strategies. Human development includes not only economic growth and financial conditions, but also individual freedoms, human dignity, social cohesion, the quality of life, human security and human rights.

Each session of the Training Forum will present and discuss one set of issues, focusing on socio-economic principles and best practice drawn from ethical foundations related to the three religions. The list of topics to be dealt with include, among others:

1. The option for the poor and the most vulnerable: solidarity in business economics and finance, and poverty eradication.
2. Human rights, the dignity of the person, liberty, equality and fraternity
3. Economic integration and interdependence, the social market economy, competition and trade, good governance, etc. in an environment of open inter-religious exchanges and cooperation
4. Subsidiarity, the respective roles of the state and society, the welfare system, multilateralism and international law
5. The protection of nature, the environment and sustainable development
6. Employment, labor force participation, income and wage distribution, the social dialogue between employers and employees, the role of small and medium enterprises
7. Equal opportunities between men and women, the role of women in society and in the economy, access to education leadership and the professions, public policies promoting equal opportunities.

We could also explore the possibility of holding one or two of the Seminars in person rather than remotely, locating them in Rome, Marseilles, Taranto and other places in the course of the year, depending on the possibility of organizing and funding them.

Organization, Participants and the 2026-2027 Program: The Training Forum will be structured in sessions and made up of webinars. It will be organized on an experimental basis over the academic year 2026-2027 starting in October 2026. We envisage 4 Sessions, once a month or every two months (October- November, January- February, March, April-May) of approximately 2 hours each. The Webinars will be convened on a virtual platform (Zoom or the like), possibly on a Monday morning. At the end of the Cycle of 4 Sessions, we plan to have a Seminar in person that could be held in Rome, back-to-back with the FCAPP International Conference and the private audience with the Pope, in June 2027. The Webinars will be conducted in English.

At the end of the Course, a certificate of attendance will be issued for the participants that followed and were actively engaged in the Sessions and the Seminars (a mechanism of evaluation will have to be defined).

The cycle of Sessions is targeted to adult professionals and young leaders engaged in business, academia, policymaking, journalists, and religious officers or leaders drawn from different cultural and religious backgrounds. No a-priori specific qualification in social science or religion is required. An effort will be made by speakers and organizers to provide documentation coaching and support so that a relatively balanced eco-system of expertise and interests may be covered by the participants. The topics chosen for the 2026-2027 cycle will be:

1. Artificial Intelligence, new technologies and the Magnifica Humanitas: challenges and Opportunities for integral Human Development
2. Jobs, Labour Force Participation, Decent Work, Entrepreneurship and SME: the road to Human Dignity for All
3. Poverty, social exclusion, inequalities, and the preferential option for the poor: new approaches to solidarity, empowerment, equal opportunities and an inclusive society
4. The challenges posed by climate change and the protection of nature: new partnerships between the private and the public sector, the local and the global dimension, individual and collective rights and duties.

Funding: In the first rounds of the Course, we expect that both participants and teachers engage on a voluntary pro-bono basis, whereas the organizing institutions would provide facilities, networking platforms, reading lists and other teaching and support materials. We also expect and trust that networking for discussing and learning purposes will stimulate the progressive engagement and active collaboration of several other and different institutions, research centers, Universities, religious associations, etc., and that through time this network can grow and reach out to different research centers, faith communities, associations and localities across the Mediterranean, and beyond.

Registration: Registration for the Course will be open in the summer of 2026, from the month of August onwards, and admissions will be decided upon depending on availability of places. We have launched the Training Forum at the International Conference of the FCAPP at the end of May and in the Med26 Festival in Barcelona on the visit of the Pope there, receiving a favorable feedback and interest. All those interested in participating should write to Fondazione Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice, for the attention of Ms Giulia Mibelli at giuliamibelli@foundation.va.

Rome, August 2026

L'articolo Human Development and its New Challenges in the Mediterranean: Abrahamic Approaches to Social and Economic Issues proviene da Fondazione Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice.

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CLICK HERE to read all the thoughts, tributes, and messages of affection from members and friends who shared years of work and fellowship with him.

Fabio Fedi presented Massimo Gattamelata’s presentation on the topic: “The Origins of Centesimus Annus and the FCAPP: Lessons from History,” during the Parallel Working Session of Group A, in the context of the FCAPP General Assembly, which was held in Rome at the Pontifical International College Maria Mater Ecclesiae on Thursday, May 28, 2026, and had the following general theme: “Renewing the Vision of Centesimus Annus: Catholic Social Thought Facing the Challenges to Freedom and Pluralism.”

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L'articolo DIALOGUES ON ETHICS AND SUSTAINABLE FINANCE. Research Report: “Ethics and Sustainable Finance” proviene da Fondazione Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice.

By  Michael Driessen. Professor of Political Science at John Cabot University, Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, University of Notre Dame, USA

The editorial addresses the challenges facing Catholic social thought in an increasingly complex international context. At the heart of the discussion are the themes of freedom, pluralism and the need to renew multilateralism and international law in order to promote the common good.

Centesimus Annus Pro-Pontifice Foundation

General Assembly and International Conference 28th – 29th and 30th May 2026

Renewing the Vision of Centesimus Annus: Catholic Social Thought Facing the Challenges to Freedom and Pluralism

How to Build New Frameworks for Multilateralism and International Law

Over the last ten years, I been working on a project that I call the “Global Politics of Interreligious Dialogue.” I use that term as a way to reflect on the ongoing transformation of religious traditions in late modernity and as indicating something about their attempts to articulate a vision of international cooperation therein.

Viewed as a kind of global movement or ideal, interreligious dialogue offers us a good sense of what global religious traditions are up to in terms of politics and theology in late modernity.

One of the things that is interesting- ironic perhaps but certainly not coincidental- is that the recent development of interreligious dialogue on the international stage and the interest of policymakers to engage with that project have coincided with the onset of a major crisis of secular liberalism as the guiding political philosophy for Western democracies, whose values also motivated international cooperation as a shared project.

So on the one hand, there is a close connection between the crisis of political liberalism and the crisis of an international system which was built upon it to facilitate cooperation. And, on the other hand, there is also a close connection between the crisis of both of those and the re-emergence of religious actors, traditions, philosophical insights and movements as major dynamics within international politics.

Now, this is not the first time that liberalism, democracy and the international system have been in crisis, nor the first time that religious traditions have seriously engaged with states and international organizations as a result.

In one reading of the birth of the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in fact, religious traditions played a key role in providing the moral and normative foundations- or as my colleague Robert Hefner has put it- of extending the moral and normative epistemologies which both documents and organizations stand upon. In doing so, they embedded these documents with spiritual hope and, critically, with spiritual charge in the face of global war and devastation. Their attempts to do so might be interpreted as a successful, early exercise in interreligious dialogue- especially if one looks at the UNESCO deliberations which engaged major and diverse religious and philosophical thinkers and came up with a workable framework to encase human rights.

Among others, Jacques Maritain is a key figure in this story as was his conceptualization of integral or Christian Humanism which would influence both those debates and the subsequent deliberations of Vatican II, Dignitatis Humanae in particular.  

And I think that as we look at the crisis of international order and multilateralism today, its helpful to go back to the core elements of the political and religious resolution which made Christian Humanism such a generative response to the crisis of modernity at its time and to do so with new eyes.

The animating heart of Christian Humanism- that all humans have been created by God with inviolable dignity; that such dignity necessitates religious freedom; and that dignity and freedom both require the development of a more inclusive and active practice of citizenship to be realized- offered a basic formula for creating and measuring institutions at all levels of politics – how we think about the international system, the state and local politics– and I would argue can help us do so today.

And in this sense, Christian Humanism represents a kind of historical arc – linking the papacies from Vatican II- through Centesimus Annus, to Pope Francis- whose exclamation that “Jesus is our Humanism” remains as live a call to Christian Humanism as any – which can be recovered today. And one reading of Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas is that it represents an attempt to do precisely that, in a way which deliberately brings that tradition to bear on what Pope Leo refers to as the “crisis of multilateralism.

In the rest of these remarks I want to make two points about renewing and/or rereading Christian Humanism in our time of international disruption.

First, I want to emphasize how these various elements together point to a need to recuperate what I would say is a lost sense of the political vocation of the Christian citizen. Perhaps having thought that the question of politics had been resolved, over the last 50 years Christian theology and movements inspired by Christian humanism have left too much space for other religious narratives to fill the political void. This includes alternative Christian views on politics that embrace nationalism and authority in ways that are at odds in dangerous ways with a Christian humanist understanding of freedom and dignity.  

And perhaps especially today I want to remember the “vocation” part of that call. In their work, Maritain and Lubac wrote in passionate terms about the heroic spiritual urgency of integral humanism, one which leads to sacrifice for the common good and social communion on the basis of love of God and love of neighbor. Maritain and Lubac wrote movingly – in ways I think we have buried- about the witness and power of fraternal love and solidarity with the outcast and the taste of human communion that it inspires in human hearts to transform the world accordingly. I do not think we can get a good measure of the mobilization of Catholic actors investing themselves in democratic politics and the building of international structures during this period without some appreciation of what my colleagues Rosario Forlenza and Bjorn Thomassen would call the political spirituality of the movement.

Maritain referred to this as the “lymph of the gospels,” writing, “From the moment in which we understand that we are made for the beatitudes, we are no longer afraid of death, but we also can no longer resign ourselves to the oppression and slavery of our brothers and sisters and we aspire, also for this early life, towards a state of emancipation that is worthy of their dignity.”  

Here Maritain is thinking about democracy not merely as an intellectual response to nationalism and isolationism – although that is clearly also important in his work- but also as a living faith, what he called a “comprehensive way of life,” a place where the poor can be blessed, where those persecuted for righteousness can build a kingdom of justice, and where enemies can be loved. In this light I am struck by how Pope Leo ends Magnifica Humanitas by recalling Mary’s Magnificat as an inspiration for politics, namely, as a place where the mighty can be cast down from their thrones. There is a strong democratic appeal in that line, especially as seen from the crisis of democracy today. Or as Henri Bergson declared in 1932, and quoted by Maritain:  “The essence of democracy is evangelical and love is its determining motive.”

That is a spiritual charge, one which requires cultural and political renewal and which also requires social organization, concrete social witness and a concrete understanding of the relationship of both to the state. I think the naming of this project is important. In the face of Christian nationalism- with organizations proudly using that title- I think we should not be afraid to call ourselves “Christian humanists” and “Christian democrats”- at least with a small “d”- Christians who are co-creators of civil society and the politics that build our common life.

One final point. I want to observe a clear strand running along side all of this which has to do with dialogue—and specifically interreligious dialogue- as key to this vision of humanism and of the kind of international cooperation it imagines. Here we need to speak about religious humanisms in the plural. Just as at the time of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, today we have multiple religious humanisms engaged in a similar attempt at moral and normative renewal in response to international crisis.

This indicates that religious traditions – again in the plural and in partnership with one another- have connected a God-bestowed understanding of human dignity and the sanctity of life to the need for renewed social solidarities for inclusive rights, citizenship formation and international cooperation

These religious communities have often done so in explicit and surprising ways by re-centering the United Nations as a place for preserving these rights, and they have connected to various traditions of religious humanism in order to do so. Here I am reminded of the Humanitarian Islam movement in Indonesia as an important example, but there are others.

In conclusion, these dynamics, taken together, offer opportunities for the creation and strengthening of new multifaith and multistakeholder alliances in favor of international cooperation, which is the title of a recent white paper cosponsored by Globethics, Wilton Park, the UN Faith for Rights and Inter-Parliamentary Union which I helped work on. These new forms of collaboration between policymakers and faith actors might be interpreted and seized upon as the beginning of a new and expanded round of global dialogues aimed at renewing the moral and normative foundations of international cooperation in the face of global crisis.  

L'articolo How to Build New Frameworks for Multilateralism and International Law proviene da Fondazione Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice.

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2026 General Assembly and International Conference

Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation

Vatican City

Most Reverend Eminences,

Most Reverend Excellencies,

Dear President,

Distinguished participants in the Assembly,

I extend my devout and fraternal greetings to all those taking part in this General Assembly of the Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation and to its President, Prof. Paolo Garonna. 

As I take the floor at this gathering, my heart is filled with both gratitude and a sense of responsibility. Gratitude, because we are granted the opportunity once again to dwell upon that spiritual and cultural project which Saint John Paul II wished to open up to the Church and the world through Centesimus Annus; responsibility, because the time entrusted to us allows for neither distractions nor superficial solutions. Read more

L'articolo Key-note Address: H.E. Msgr. Giordano Piccinotti, President of APSA “How to provide leadership and build consensus in diverse and pluralistic societies?” proviene da Fondazione Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice.