The Church Reorganized Itself Around the Idea of Integral Human Development: Optimizing Integral Human Development -- Understanding the Social Mission of the Catholic Church, Part 4

Part 4 of a ten-part series on the social mission of the Catholic Church.

Part 4: The Church Reorganized Itself Around the Idea of Integral Human Development

This is Part 4 of Optimizing Integral Human Development, a ten-part series on the social mission of the Catholic Church. This installment examines how Francis rebuilt part of the Roman Curia around integral human development, and why Leo XIV kept the structure.

Doctrine can be measured by words. It can also be measured by structure. When an institution rearranges its own machinery to serve a single purpose, it reveals what it takes that purpose to be worth. In 2016, Pope Francis rebuilt part of the Roman Curia around integral human development, and the reconstruction shows how central the idea has become to the Church’s view of its social mission.

Francis Merged Four Councils Into One Dicastery

In August 2016, Francis dissolved four pontifical councils -- Justice and Peace, Cor Unum, the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People, and the Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers -- and combined them into a single body: the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. He appointed Cardinal Peter Turkson, the Ghanaian who had led the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, as its first prefect.

Each of the four had handled a distinct portfolio. Justice and Peace addressed economic structures, labor, and political order. Cor Unum coordinated charitable works. The migrants’ council served refugees and the displaced. The health care council ministered to the sick and those who tend them. Four offices, four mandates, four staffs.

Francis judged the division a mistake. By folding all four into one Dicastery under one mandate, he asserted that their concerns were never really separate.

Francis’s Merger Made a Theological Claim

Francis argued, in the language of institutional structure, that justice, charity, migration, and health are interconnected aspects of one task. A person cannot address migration honestly while ignoring the economic injustice that drives people from home, the violence that makes their countries unlivable, and the collapse of health systems that decides who survives. Charity divorced from justice treats symptoms and ignores causes. Health divorced from economics pretends that who lives and who dies has nothing to do with how wealth and power are arranged.

The single Dicastery embodies the conviction that runs through Catholic social teaching: the human person is one, and the conditions for flourishing form one interconnected web. Francis reshaped the institution to match the teaching.

The Founding Statutes State the Goal Directly

The document establishing the Dicastery states its purpose without ambiguity. The new body promotes integral human development in the light of the Gospel and in the line of Catholic social teaching. Its competence, according to the statutes, covers questions of migration, those in need, the sick and the excluded, the marginalized and the victims of armed conflict and natural disasters, the imprisoned, the unemployed, and the victims of every form of slavery and torture.

The list reads as a catalogue of the human person under threat. The Dicastery exists to defend the person at every point of vulnerability -- which is to say, to promote integral human development across every dimension Catholic social teaching has identified.

The Structure Survived a Change of Pontificate

Institutions reveal their importance by what outlasts their founders. Francis died in April 2025. A reorganization that reflected only one pope’s enthusiasm would have been a candidate for quiet dismantling by his successor, the way incoming administrations routinely undo the structural choices of those they replace.

Leo XIV did the opposite. Elected in May 2025, an American Augustinian whose background and instincts differ markedly from Francis’s, he kept both the Dicastery and its mandate, now under Cardinal Michael Czerny, whom Francis had appointed prefect in 2022.

A year later, Magnifica Humanitas described Catholic social teaching as a living body of truth that interprets humanity’s vocation to a full and just life. The institutional commitment Francis built, Leo XIV confirmed.

A structure that two very different popes both judged essential reflects more than one papacy’s enthusiasm. It expresses the Church’s considered judgment about what its social mission requires.

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This essay is part of a ten part series on Optimizing Integral Human Development -- Understanding the Social Mission of the Catholic Church.

The individual parts of the series are:

Part One: The Two Leos, 135 Years Apart

Part Two: Integral Human Development Is 2,400 Years Old

Part Three: Six Popes Have Taught the Same Doctrine

Part Four: The Church Reorganized Itself Around the Idea of Integral Human Development

Part Five: The Dimensions of Integral Human Development

Part Six: What Integral Human Development Rejects

Part Seven: Integral Human Development in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Part Eight: The Attack on Empathy

Part Nine: Catholic Against Catholicism

Part Ten: What Integral Human Development Requires of Us Now