Cardinal Michael Czerny received Villanova University’s inaugural Pope Leo XIV Sustainability Medal on Tuesday, Oct. 13—the same day Pope Leo underwent surgery, and just hours before his lung cancer diagnosis was announced.
“You know you can’t get the headline,” the cardinal joked to the few journalists who attended the ceremony. While almost 60 journalists had requested places at the event, only a handful were there.
The award ceremony took place on the extensive grounds of the Borgo Laudato Si’, a 135-acre facility of gardens, greenhouses, farmland, a restaurant and a learning center, all aimed at sustainability education. It was attended by participants in an international sustainability conference convened by Villanova in Rome, as well as representatives from the university and the Vatican.
The award, named for the first Augustinian pope and awarded by the Augustinian university he attended, honors individuals’ contributions to care for the environment, social justice, support for vulnerable populations and responsible stewardship of resources. It is set to be awarded every other year in partnership with the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, which Cardinal Czerny led as prefect until his retirement in September.
Pope Leo was scheduled to present the medal; in his absence, it was awarded by Peter M. Donohue, O.S.A., the president of Villanova. “I hope as you receive this award, you imagine somebody in white giving it to you,” the Augustinian joked to Cardinal Czerny.
Despite a few jokes, the mood was subdued by uncertainty about the pope’s health and participants’ disappointment that he could not be present. “Before I begin, I want to acknowledge what is on all our hearts,” Father Donahue said. “We all know his Holiness, Pope Leo XIV, is unable to join us today due to health reasons. While we feel his absence deeply, our first concern is for his well-being.”
Cardinal Fabio Baggio, who oversees the Borgo Laudato Si’, led the more than 300 people gathered for the award ceremony in a minute of silent prayer for the pope. “His absence reminds us of a simple but profound truth: We need one another,” the cardinal said.
Cardinal Czerny, accepting the award, acknowledged that his parents’ “love of nature and commitment to recycling rubbed off on me” before briefly proposing two literary models of sustainability: the biblical figure Noah, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince.
Noah, the cardinal said, represented “a chance, before it’s too late, to safeguard—to save—humanity from environmental self-destruction.” The titular “Little Prince” likewise sought to save the singular rose remaining on his planet from being eaten by sheep.
“Let us heed these haunting, poetic images lamenting the calamity of unsustainability. They urge us toward deep and constant conversion, the only true solution: to discard our many bad habits and adopt new paths through countless personal, communal and social changes of behavior,” the cardinal said.
Sustainability as a communal effort
Speaking to reporters before the award ceremony, Cardinal Czerny described the honor as “a shared award” because “sustainability is not like a kind of a personal achievement. Sustainability is because we all pull in the same direction.”
Speaking alongside the cardinal, John Abubakar, O.S.A., Villanova’s chief sustainability officer, said that the award selection committee—chaired by Prince Albert II of Monaco—had aimed to find an honoree who lived out the “ethical and moral dimension of sustainability.” Father Abubakar noted that there are many sustainability awards “for those who play within the space” but that they primarily focus on technical and business aspects of sustainability.
Cardinal Czerny, prior to working in the Vatican’s dicastery for integral human development, co-founded the Jesuit Forum for Social Faith and Justice in Toronto in 1979 and founded the African Jesuit AIDS Network in 2002. He also served as director and vice rector at the Central American University in El Salvador just after the assassinations of six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter by the Salvadoran military.
Reflecting on his work coordinating health care, education and other social services for HIV and AIDS patients in sub-Saharan Africa, Cardinal Czerny said that the work was a form of sustainability.
“The whole idea was precisely that AIDS is not an inevitable fate but a challenge and, in fact, an opportunity for people to participate in offering real healing,” the cardinal said. “People felt, and in a certain sense were, condemned to death, and the community responded, saved them for life. What was most moving, consoling, was when they would testify, ‘I was dead, and now I’m alive. I was dead, and I had risen,’ whether or not they still had AIDS, which they probably did.”
Artificial intelligence
Although he has now retired from his position in the human development dicastery, Cardinal Czerny is still the head of the Vatican’s commission on artificial intelligence, which was created to oversee the internal use of A.I. tools in the Vatican but now takes on a broader mandate following widespread interest in Pope Leo’s encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas.”
Asked about comments he previously made saying that he does not use A.I. despite heading the A.I. commission, the cardinal walked back his remarks slightly, joking: “That was an accident. I was under journalistic pressure.”
“The smartest answer would have been to say it’s impossible not to use A.I., so in some ways the question is not valid,” the cardinal said. “But it is true that I am not adept at using one of the big models to do my work,” he added. “But that’s not what’s important.”
Drawing a parallel with sustainability work, the cardinal said: “What we are seeking—and what the encyclical promotes—is to widen the sense of responsibility. The worst thing that can happen with A.I. is that people accept the risks and the dangers and the downsides as inevitable—what we used to call fate—and in the face of fate you just give up.”
He cautioned that the temptation to “give up” is also an isolating one that “comes at a time when, let’s say, the dynamics of civic responsibility or the exercise of democracy is in trouble itself.”
“Just when we have a huge problem that we should be dealing with together, we’re not very good at getting together and facing problems,” the cardinal said. “A.I. is a great achievement, a great accomplishment, as the pope himself said, and it holds all sorts of promise. But if we can’t handle it together responsibly, we’re going to be in deep trouble.”
Plans for the $25,000 prize
Asked about his post-retirement reflections on his “active years,” Cardinal Czerny responded: “I am in my active years. I have not slowed down at all.”
Reflecting on his past seven years as a cardinal—he was made cardinal by Pope Francis in 2019—Czerny said that cardinals are chosen to help the pope in his mission in a public way. “Francis or Leo both could have privately said to me, ‘Look, could you give me a hand for this or that?’ and I would have said yes, and nobody would have had to know,” the cardinal said.
Asked what he would do with the $25,000 prize money that accompanies the Pope Leo XIV Sustainability Medal, the cardinal replied immediately, “Spend it!”
“My attitude toward money is spend,” the cardinal said. “I’ll use the money in order to be able to help the Holy Father with whatever it is that he’s asking me to do, and thanks to the prize I won’t have to bother him for 5 or 10 euros each time he asks me to do something,” he added.
“It’s a great gift because it frees me up to be more helpful without having to worry about budget, which I’m not very good at worrying about anyway,” the cardinal said.
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