Pope Leo will present Villanova University’s first-ever sustainability medal to a cardinal who founded an AIDS network

A Czechoslovakian-born cardinal who is based at the Vatican will receive Villanova University’s inaugural sustainability medal for his work “at the intersection of human dignity, social justice, care for vulnerable communities and care for creation,” the university announced Monday.

Pope Leo XIV, a Villanova alumnus, will present the medal named for him to Cardinal Michael Czerny on Oct. 13 at the university’s international sustainability conference in Italy.

Villanova established the award earlier this year to honor someone whose work shows “exceptional commitment to ecological responsibility, social justice, care for the most vulnerable and responsible stewardship of economic and human resources.”

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The award is in part inspired by Pope Leo’s call to serve the poor and marginalized, said the Rev. Peter M. Donohue, Villanova’s president, who announced the winner at a news conference in Rome. Taking care of the environment and the poor are inextricably linked, Villanova said.

“The Medal reflects a deeply held belief at Villanova: care for our common home and care for one another are inseparable,” Donohue said in a statement. “Cardinal Czerny’s work has shown us that care for creation cannot be separated from care for people.”

The medal features Pope Leo on one side and Villanova University’s name on the other and is meant to highlight the pope’s commitment to sustainability, the school said. The winner can come from any field or discipline and is selected by a committee of members of the university’s Sustainability Leadership Council.

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The medal carries a $25,000 award to be used toward continued work in sustainability, the university said.

Born in 1946 in the former Czechoslovakia, Czerny, 80, moved to Montreal with his family as a small child. His mother was Jewish and the family had converted to Catholicism, but several members of his family had died at the hands of Nazis, according to the National Catholic Reporter, which featured an article on Czerny in 2022.

“My mother’s family — both parents and two brothers — were also Catholic but shared the Jewish origins that the enemy abhorred,” Czerny said in a homily, quoted by the National Catholic Reporter. “My maternal grandmother Anna, my grandfather Hans and my uncles Georg and Carl Robert, were all interned in Terezín, where Hans died... My grandmother and uncles were transported to Auschwitz. From here my uncles were sent to labor camps and eventually murdered there.”

His mother and father were forced to work as farm laborers because of her Jewish ancestry and his unwillingness to divorce her.

Czerny became a Jesuit priest in 1973 and got a doctorate in human sciences, social thought and theology from the University of Chicago in 1978. He was named a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2019.

Over the last five decades, his work was focused on helping vulnerable people worldwide, the university said. In 1979, Czerny founded and led a center for faith and social justice in Toronto. He volunteered to be based in El Salvador during the country’s civil war, and from 2002 to 2010, he worked in Africa and founded the African Jesuit AIDs Network in Kenya.

“That organization he led brought in a lot of hope,” said the Rev. John Abubakar, Villanova’s chief sustainability officer, who is from Nigeria. “It made a massive, massive influence or difference in the lives of people.”

From 2022 until Sept. 1, Czerny headed the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development as Prefect, a role in which he led the Church’s work on justice, migration, health and care for creation. Pope Francis in 2022 sent him to Slovakia to greet refugees fleeing Ukraine following the Russian invasion.

Czerny said he was grateful for the medal and the honor it brings.

“What’s most important I think is the commitment the university is making to include sustainability in how it is forming the future leaders of our church and in this case the United States,” he said in a video on the Vatican news site.