Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

At this university, education was never conceived as a purely academic project. From its very beginning, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore—the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, known in Milan as the Cattolica—was framed as a mission: to train professionals and scholars within a Catholic worldview, while building institutions that could withstand wars, political upheavals, and student unrest.

A founding driven by Giusepppe Toniolo

The story starts with a recommendation made as World War I was ending. In September 1918, Giuseppe Toniolo—a leading figure in Catholic social thought—urged Father Agostino Gemelli and his collaborators to create a Catholic university, saying he would not see the end of the war but that they should found it afterward. That call shaped the groundwork. In 1919, Father Agostino Gemelli, Ludovico Necchi, Francesco Olgiati, Armida Barelli, and Ernesto Lombardo founded the Istituto Giuseppe Toniolo di Studi Superiori. On 24 June 1920, the institute received legal recognition through a decree signed by the Minister of Education, Benedetto Croce. In the same period, Pope Benedict XV officially recognized the university’s ecclesiastical status—an early signal that this would be both an academic and a Church-recognized institution.