Academy for Death: Leo XIV Appoints Assisted Suicide Advocate to Head Pro-Life Office

With Msgr. Renzo Pegoraro’s promotion, the Pontifical Academy for Life is now openly run by those who oppose its very name

On May 27, 2025, Leo XIV appointed Monsignor Renzo Pegoraro as the new president of the Pontifical Academy for Life. Pegoraro, a bioethicist and physician, has served as chancellor of the Academy since 2011 and helped engineer its transformation under Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia from a defender of life into a post-Christian bioethics think tank. His promotion is a coronation for bioethical subversion.

Public Support for Assisted Suicide

In 2022, Pegoraro publicly justified assisted suicide as a “lesser evil” in secular legislation. While admitting that neither assisted suicide nor euthanasia represent the Catholic position, he nevertheless called for legalizing the former under certain conditions, an action flatly condemned by Evangelium Vitae, which declares assisted suicide “never excusable, even if requested by the person seeking assistance” (EV 65–66).

Pegoraro proposes a legal framework for institutionalizing a mortal sin and now leads the Vatican body once created to prevent exactly that.

Institutionalized Betrayal of Evangelium Vitae

John Paul II’s landmark encyclical treated cooperation with assisted suicide as a grave injustice. Yet the Academy now promotes precisely what the encyclical condemned. The teaching is clear. The new regime is clearer: it doesn’t care.

A History of Subversion at the Academy

Pegoraro’s betrayal doesn’t end with assisted suicide. Under his chancellorship, the Academy has:

• Blurred the line between public health and Catholic morality, praising experimental COVID-19 vaccination (developed from aborted fetal cell lines) as a form of “communal salvation.”

• Hosted pro-abortion speakers and tolerated heterodox views within its own ranks.

• Retweeted articles calling for “rethinking” the Church’s condemnation of contraception.

• Contributed to a 2022 volume (Theological Ethics of Life) proposing pastoral “flexibility” on contraception and assisted reproductive technologies—effectively advocating the soft repeal of Humanae Vitae.

In short, Pegoraro’s Academy has not only ceased to defend life. It has become a laboratory for moral relativism.

The Quiet Push for Contraception and Reproductive Engineering

The 2022 Academy book, which Pegoraro helped organize, included essays explicitly questioning whether Humanae Vitae’s teaching on contraception could be “re-evaluated” in light of “lived experience.” These proposals were not published by secular dissidents, they were published by the Vatican’s own bioethics arm.

Meanwhile, Pegoraro has participated in multiple conferences discussing artificial reproductive technologies. While publicly cautious of IVF, he has advanced a technocratic ethic that sees reproductive medicine not through the lens of natural law, but through modern utility. The emphasis is no longer on whether a technique violates God’s plan for marriage and procreation; it’s whether it serves human autonomy, alleviates suffering, or reduces psychological trauma.

In 2012, Pegoraro lamented that “the idea that technology can offer a solution without trying to resolve the real problem of infertility” could lead to “missing solutions.” But his critiques are anthropological, not theological. The doctrine of the Church, even reaffirmed in post-Conciliar documents like Donum Vitae and Dignitas Personae, declares that all techniques which dissociate procreation from the marital act are intrinsically immoral. Pegoraro’s work subtly reframes this teaching as a question open to debate.

Dissent Inside the Academy

Not all members of the Pontifical Academy for Life have remained silent. Orthodox members have criticized the Academy for promoting confusion, sidelining moral absolutes, and legitimizing sin under pastoral slogans. Reports of internal division, such as those documented by the SSPX and other traditional outlets, reveal a body no longer committed to Catholic doctrine but fractured by ideological civil war.

And now that civil war is over. Modernism won.

The New Religion: Bioethics without God

1. Global Bioethics and Secular Humanism

Pegoraro has partnered with secular and interreligious networks such as the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights. These institutions promote a model of “global bioethics” rooted in pluralism, consensus, and therapeutic humanism rather than divine Revelation. Pegoraro’s collaborations with secular bioethics organizations reflect a shift from divine command to dialogical consensus. The Gospel of Life is slowly being rewritten in the idiom of the United Nations.

2. Anthropocentrism and Language Drift

In talk after talk, Pegoraro returns to a now-familiar arsenal of pastoral euphemisms: “accompaniment,” “compassion,” “conscience,” and “complexity.” These terms, while appearing benign, are often weaponized to soften absolute norms and baptize moral deviance. Pegoraro’s bioethics is heavy on accompaniment, but light on authority. Compassion becomes code for compromise, and complexity becomes cover for capitulation.

3. Silence on Abortion in Official Statements

Though he leads an institution named for life, Pegoraro’s public record is remarkably quiet on abortion. While eager to speak on climate change, vaccine policy, and social justice, he rarely issues clear condemnations of abortion as murder. In an age of daily slaughter in the womb, his silence is complicity.

Conclusion: Apostasy in White Coats

A Pontifical Academy for Life that rethinks contraception, defends vaccination campaigns built on aborted tissue, and proposes legal frameworks for assisted suicide is not Catholic. It is not “pastoral,” or merciful; it is apostate.

This is what Rome now promotes. This is what Leo XIV ratifies. And this is what the faithful must reject.

Postscript

The late John Paul II prophetically warned:

“A person who, because of illness or disability, is led to think that his life is no longer worth living, would be helped to find in his suffering a call to conversion and a participation in Christ’s suffering—not a justification for death.”

The new Academy has traded that Gospel of Life for a new creed: consent, compliance, and compromise.