Promoting a Quality Culture

The purpose of the guide “Promoting a Quality Culture” is to help ecclesiastical Universities/Faculties understand the norms that were introduced by the Congregation for Catholic Education (CCE), also in recent times, and implement them in a standardized way. Such norms and rules were introduced also because of the many international initiatives the Holy See takes part in, thereby making the quality of culture a feature of ordinary academic life.

The aim is to contribute to making the entire system of ecclesiastical studies more consistent in terms of service quality. It is the first initiative of this kind, which reconciles the intention to provide both useful information to users (Academic and Official Authorities) with the need for criteria to stimulate quality culture.

Hence, the Guide does not include everything: it does not exhaustively provide all possible and necessary information for academic life to take place; rather, it lays down basic criteria for users to fulfill their mission, by providing examples that can easily be implemented or developed by the various Institutions. It recalls the prescriptive features and points out the necessary process to be implemented to improve the Institutions.

The Guide includes three parts that are quite different from each other:

• • The first part provides a summary description of the ecclesiastical education system and its specific mission.
  • The second part calls for an improvement of processes related to such mission, suggesting relevant criteria. It is organized into three steps: a short overview of existing ecclesiastical regulations, suggestions regarding the gathering of useful data, and guidance in order to establish a quality culture.
  • The third part is dedicated to a presentation of AVEPRO and its activity.

Instead of  reading the Guide from the first page to the last, perhaps it is better read as a reference text about individual topics, whenever accurate methodological instructions are needed.

Chapters tend to be complete, albeit not exhaustive, so that they can be consulted quickly when needed, and also separately from other chapters. This can make for a number of repetitions and, perhaps, a text that is not too nimble overall. In order to make consultation easier, a glossary is provided in order for users to adequately know and use key concepts.

The handbook entitled “The Culture of Quality. A Guide for Ecclesiastical Faculties” is available from Libreria Editrice Vaticana in Italian and English.