Dr. Pia de Solenni (’93) Brings Moral Guidance to Catholic Investing

“A for-profit business hired a moral theologian to be … a moral theologian,” remarks Dr. Pia de Solenni (’93), who earlier this year joined IWP Capital as its senior director of corporate engagement. She has advocated for the Catholic perspective to secular companies and even met with His Eminence Cardinal Peter Turkson, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

In her new position, Dr. de Solenni aids IWP, a Catholic investment screening company, in engaging with other businesses to promote Catholic values. “The engagement part is so important,” says Dr. de Solenni. “Many times, companies will say, ‘We’ve never heard from people with values like yours and didn’t know you cared.’ If you don’t speak up for yourself, then you allow others to become your voice, so it’s important that Catholics, Christians, and all people of goodwill step up and voice their concerns.”

“It’s important that Catholics, Christians, and all people of goodwill step up and voice their concerns.”

One highlight of Dr. de Solenni’s career with IWP Capital was her visit with Cardinal Turkson, author of Mensuram Bonam, which aims to help Catholic investors develop guidelines consistent with the Church’s teachings while still yielding financial return. Dr. de Solenni and the CEO of IWP Capital, Sam Saladino, met with the Cardinal to discuss what their company was doing and why it worked.

“His Eminence was very pleased with our concrete methodology and the work we’re doing in corporate engagement,” Dr. de Solenni says. “We try to show companies that, after providing good and ethical products or services, their job is to return dividends to their shareholders to gift where they please rather than take that money to make big corporate gifts. Cardinal Turkson was especially supportive of our goals and offered to work with us in the future, so we’re very excited about that.”

An ethicist and theologian, Dr. de Solenni is an expert on issues of human life, women in the Church, and culture. After graduating from Thomas Aquinas College in 1993, she earned a Sacred Theology Doctorate, summa cum laude, from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. In 2001, Pope St. John Paul II awarded her the Prize of the Pontifical Academies for her dissertation analyzing feminist theories in the light of St. Thomas Aquinas’s teachings. In 2016, the Most Rev. Kevin Vann, Bishop of Orange, California named her Theological Consultant to the Office of Bishop and, less than a year later, appointed her as chancellor to the diocese — the highest position available to the laity — which she held for three years.

“We don’t see ourselves as activists, but as stewards,” says Dr. de Solenni on her work with IWP Capital. “We’re helping people manage their financial assets in accordance with their faith, which is why institutions and individuals are drawn to what we do.”