The legacy of Pope Francis in an unjust world

Without explicitly naming neoliberalism, Laudato Si’ deplored the unjust results of recent forms of globalisation that resulted in acute poverty and extreme inequality. He blamed assumptions in certain forms of economics ‘grounded in a utilitarian mindset (individualism, unlimited progress, competition, consumerism, the unregulated market)’ (#210). Francis said ‘the ideology of the market’ assumed that the market would simply ensure the best outcomes without adequately considering questions of social and distributive justice. He accused powerful interest groups of undue influence over financial policy, making the rules to suit themselves (#123). The world could not solve problems without development ‘in human responsibility, values and conscience’ (#105). Laudato Si’ was generally very well received, including by most economists. It generated enormous interest and helped spur popular concern and action to address global warming.

At the time, hopes were high that the proposed SDGs, learning from the relatively successful Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015), could provide a detailed roadmap to a more equitable and sustainable world. Throwing his moral support behind the SDGs, Pope Francis addressed the UN General Assembly on 25 September 2015, highlighting the problems of inequality and global warming. Almost immediately after his address, the UN delegates from more than 190 nations voted to endorse the SDGs in the resolution Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Opposition to the economic views of Pope Francis

To undermine the political impact of Church statements critiquing extreme inequality and unjust economic policies, vested interests in the United States—particularly since the 1970s—have been organising to discredit or attack them. Sharon Beder in her 2006 book Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values examined how neoconservative networks like the American Enterprise Institute, with enormous funding from wealthy patrons, spread their neoliberal philosophy and politics through a prodigious network of print, radio and TV media, think tanks and conferences.

The Catholic neoconservatives, including the late Michael Novak and Richard John Neuhaus, contested the major social documents of the US bishops and of Pope Paul VI and John Paul II, reinterpreting Church teaching in a way more acceptable to political and financial interests.

In Australia, one of the most severe critics of Laudato Si’ was Paul Kelly, editor-at-large of The Australian, who on 24 June 2015 declared the Pope’s language ‘almost hysterical. Profound intellectual ignorance is dressed up as honouring God.’ Pope Francis and his advisers were ‘environmental populists and economic ideologues of a quasi-Marxist bent’. The editorial in The Weekend Australian added that Francis ‘appears to have swallowed a new pernicious dogma’. Kelly strongly rejected warnings of catastrophic climate change. Several other writers in that issue followed suit.

Pope Francis faced growing opposition in the United States and elsewhere, particularly for his views on protecting immigrants and refugees. One opponent was Steve Bannon, former editor of the online magazine Breitbart and later strategic adviser to Donald Trump until 2017. He went to Europe in 2019 and tried to set up an institute to mobilise populist movements. He became closely allied with Matteo Salvini, leader of the Northern League and, for a time, Minister of the Interior after the Italian elections in March 2018.

Francis: Examine the signs of the times by embracing synodal processes

Despite the high hopes for implementing the SDGs, Francis grew increasingly alarmed that this historic global effort to eliminate the worst forms of hunger and poverty was failing. In an address to the President of the UN General Assembly and finance ministers of various nations on 27 May 2019, he again warned that the world was heading ‘towards disaster’ from greenhouse gases. He blamed ‘the idolatry of money, along with the corruption of vested interests. We still reckon as profit what threatens our very survival’. On 9 June he again lamented the slow progress to achieve the SDGs. A few days later, on 14 June, he appealed to executives from leading energy companies to help avert ‘a climate emergency’, and said carbon pricing was ‘essential’.

To arouse the consciousness of Catholics in the Amazon region about how dire were threats to the Amazon biome and to its peoples, and to mobilise concerted resistance to destructive local and outside forces, Francis announced in October 2017 that he was calling a Synod of Bishops of the Amazon region, with the theme ‘New Paths for the Church and for an Integral Ecology’. Widespread participation in small and large groups involved nearly 87,000 people in discussions before the bishops of Amazonia met in Rome in October 2019. Their Final Document outlined the social and ecological crises in the Amazon region and denounced ‘the economic model of predatory and ecocidal development’, which resulted in the assassination of Indigenous people who were being driven from their lands and the destruction of the rainforests which were so vital for the global climate. The Synod called for the peoples of the Amazon to be ‘agents of their own destiny’ with the Church an ally.

Pope Francis strongly endorsed the conclusions of the Amazon Synod in his response, Querida Amazonia, in February 2020. He feared an ‘ecological disaster’ and was deeply concerned that the people were facing the ‘worst forms of enslavement, subjection and poverty’. He wrote: ‘We cannot allow globalisation to become a new version of colonialism’ (#14).

These were stunning indictments of the predatory forms of capitalism plundering the Amazon, largely in the interests of overseas interests in collusion with local businesses and others.

But more was to follow in Francis’s next encyclical, Fratelli tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship in October 2020, warning that the global situation had deteriorated so badly with social and economic distress that it could result in war. He was alarmed that the hopes expressed in Laudato Si’ to wind back hunger and poverty were failing.

Presumably referring to the SDGs, he wrote: ‘A plan that would set great goals for the development of our entire human family nowadays sounds like madness’ (#16). ‘Without an attempt to enter into that way of thinking, what I am saying here will sound wildly unrealistic . . . we can rise to the challenge of envisaging a new humanity. We can aspire to a world that provides land, housing and work for all.’ (#127). As for the new waves of migrants and refugees, he repeated his response as being to ‘welcome, protect, promote and integrate’ (#129). ‘Liberty, equality and fraternity can remain lofty ideals unless they apply to everyone’ (#219).

With the COVID-19 pandemic spreading around the world, in December 2020 Pope Francis issued a 150-page book (co-authored with the journalist Austen Ivereigh), Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, summarising his critique of neoliberalism. Francis declared: ‘The obsession with profit weakens the institutions that can protect a people from reckless economic interests and the excessive concentration of power’. He said that ‘I don’t criticise the market per se’, but how it has become ‘detached from morality’, bringing ‘spectacular wealth for a few but also poverty and deprivation for many. Millions are robbed of hope’ (p. 116).

In the face of increasingly severe weather events damaging infrastructure and food production, in July 2022 he said that the planetary system was reaching ‘a breaking point’. He appealed urgently for all people ‘to listen to the cry of the poor and the cry of the planet’, and ‘to modify their lifestyles and destructive systems’. The poor and Indigenous peoples were at greatest risk.

Francis appealed to a thousand young economists at a conference organised by the Economy of Francesco group in Assisi in September 2022, ‘to look at the world with the eyes of the poorest’, and help transform ‘an economy that kills into an economy of life’, where everyone has dignified work, and ‘finance is a friend and ally of the real economy and of labour, and not against them.’

It is highly unusual for Pope Francis to name individual economists, but he specifically commended the work of the Oxford economist Kate Raworth with her metaphor of ‘doughnut economics’—about how to promote a ‘distributive, regenerative economy that moves people out of the “hole” of poverty’ and avoids environmental damage. He also commended Mariana Mazzucato, Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London, who in many books argues for restructuring capitalism in a way that is much more inclusive and sustainable. She envisages the state being more directive in partnership with businesses and community groups and aiming for a green economy, social equity and participation. In November 2022 Francis appointed Mazzucato to the Pontifical Academy for Life, to ‘give it a little more humanity’ as a ‘great economist’.

Mazzucato convened a dialogue with Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados and Pope Francis in the Vatican in November 2024, on ‘An Economics of the Common Good: Theory and Practice’.

Was Pope Francis orthodox with his economic views?

Francis was not going beyond the pale with his social and economic views. He was indeed following closely in the footsteps of his predecessors who had been acutely aware of the social problems arising from exploitation and oppression under various economic systems. Pope Leo XIII in 1891 issued his famous encyclical Rerum Novarum, rejecting laissez-faire forms of economic liberalism, insisting instead on the right to a just wage, the right to form trade unions, a fairer distribution of wealth, and a just regulatory role for the state. Leo’s document significantly influenced the development of industrial relations in Australia and promoted Catholic involvement in social reform movements worldwide.

Pope Paul VI’s Development of Peoples in 1967 clearly rejected ‘unchecked liberalism’, which ‘considers profit as the key motive for economic progress, competition as the supreme law of economics, and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right that has no limits and carries no corresponding social obligation’ (#26). Much later, Pope Benedict XVI in his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate (#8) urged Catholics to read Development of Peoples again, as their new social manifesto.

Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Centesimus Annus (1991) strongly reiterated the Church’s critique of capitalism when it excluded most people from any genuine ownership (#6). He wanted to rebuild democracies ‘inspired by social justice’, with ‘market mechanisms’ subject to public control for the common good. With his eyes fixed on countries emerging from the former Soviet Union, he offered the Church’s social teaching as ‘a new and authentic theory and praxis of liberation’ (#26). He said ‘it is right to speak of a struggle against an economic system, if the latter is understood as a method of upholding the absolute predominance of capital’ (#35). He feared that after the collapse of communism ‘a radical capitalist ideology could spread’, blindly entrusting problems to the free development of market forces (#34).

In Latvia in 1993, John Paul bluntly declared that Catholic social teaching is not ‘a surrogate for capitalism’, and that the Catholic Church had ‘always distanced itself from capitalist ideology, holding it responsible for grave social injustices…. I myself, after the historical failure of communism, did not hesitate to raise serious doubts on the validity of capitalism.’ In Cuba in January 1998, he again attacked ‘a certain capitalist neoliberalism that subordinates the human person to blind market forces’.

In his World Day of Peace message in January 2003, John Paul II regarded the global scene as like ‘a war of the rich against the poor… How can we keep silent when confronted by the enduring drama of hunger and extreme poverty, in an age where humanity, more than ever, has the capacity for a just sharing of resources.’

Francis spoke for the Global South, deploring the lost opportunities to eradicate the grossest poverty and hunger—in great part due to the dominance of neoliberal economics until recently—but he also pointed a way forward.

Francis’s formula for participation and engagement today: See–Judge–Act

The Church in Latin America had for five decades been using widespread consultation processes with people and priests meeting in small or large groups from parish level feeding up into dioceses and finally into the continent-wide conferences of the bishops. These processes were strongly influenced by the See–Judge–Act methods used by the Young Christian Workers movement (YCW, or JOC in French) and other networks, which taught people to examine their local situations, at work and beyond, to reflect and discuss issues of concern prayerfully in the light of the Gospel, and then to determine appropriate action to improve situations. Paulo Freire adapted this concept to spread his literacy programs, which aroused people’s social and political consciousness. Use of such methods in the Basic Christian Communities morphed in a short time into liberation theology movements in various forms—and not just through Latin America.

Francis himself had imbibed this See–Judge–Act way of thinking and social analysis, and it appears prominently in many of his writings. It invites people to discuss their own life situations in small groups, then, in the light of the Gospel, to reflect on what the Holy Spirit might be asking of them—or, in the Jesuit terminology Francis often uses—to discern. It is a process of empowerment: learning how to listen carefully to what others are saying, and to feel supported to take agency or control in sometimes challenging matters in the workplace or society.

The Belgian priest Canon Joseph Cardijn developed this method a century ago for what became the Young Christian Workers (YCW) movement. The two key words for Cardijn were consciousness and responsibility. Francis has adapted this into the synodal processes, and hoped to see this wide lay participation become a basic way of operating in the Church, transforming it from the previous clerical dominance.

The second session of the Synod on Synodality in October 2024 emerged with its Final Document: For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, Mission. Though it was mainly concerned with internal Church matters, the document endorsed Pope Francis’s social engagement in areas of peace and justice, care for our common home, and interreligious and intercultural dialogue, but insisted that this social teaching ‘must be more widely shared’ among Catholics. ‘The commitment to defending life and human rights, for the proper ordering of society, for the dignity of work, for a fair and supportive economy, and for an integral ecology is part of the evangelising mission’ of the Church (#151).

‘The Church’s synodality thus becomes a social prophecy, inspiring new paths in the political and economic spheres, as well as collaborating with all those who believe in fellowship and peace’ (#153).

If the Catholic Church is truly able to embrace the vision of Pope Francis for a more just and peaceful world, with a renewed sense of care and responsibility for the planet and universal human wellbeing; and if the new processes of synodality do help engage Catholics and all people of good will in closer dialogue and cooperation, then this legacy of Pope Francis will indeed be good news for the world.