Agency for the Evaluation and Promotion of Quality in Ecclesiastical Universities and Faculties

Benedict XVI established AVEPRO on 19 September 2007. Its official mission is to promote and develop a culture of quality in academic institutions that depend directly on the Holy See and to ensure that their quality criteria have international validity. Its work serves ecclesiastical universities and faculties without erasing their specifically ecclesiastical nature, canonical mission, or legitimate diversity.

The agency arose within the Holy See's participation in the Bologna Process and its concern for a common European higher-education area, international cooperation, and quality in teaching and research. Participation in international quality systems is a means of responsible academic stewardship; it does not transfer the Church's authority over ecclesiastical studies to a secular accrediting body.

AVEPRO assists institutions in defining internal procedures for evaluating teaching, research, and services. It develops practical instruments such as guidelines, databases, and information networks. It also organizes external evaluation procedures and visits by qualified experts, so that internal self-assessment and outside review form complementary parts of quality assurance.^[1]

The agency's independent character supports the credibility of its judgments. It collaborates with ecclesiastical universities and faculties, the competent Holy See dicastery, episcopal conferences, civil and international authorities, and those responsible for academic institutions in local Churches. Collaboration does not make these bodies one institution or give AVEPRO the general government of Catholic education.

The Holy See lists AVEPRO among institutions connected with the Holy See, not as a dicastery of the Roman Curia or as a university. That classification matters. The agency evaluates and promotes quality; the competent ecclesiastical authority erects institutions, approves statutes and programs where required, and governs the conferral of canonical academic degrees according to law.^[2]

AVEPRO is the ordinary short name of the Agency for the Evaluation and Promotion of Quality in Ecclesiastical Universities and Faculties. The shortened expression Agency for the Evaluation and Promotion of Quality in Ecclesiastical Faculties refers to the same body, but the full current title expressly includes both ecclesiastical universities and faculties.