Pope Francis and the soul of economics

One of the more surprising — and often missed — aspects of Francis' 12-year papacy was his emergence as an incisive economic visionary, urging the world to place moral values above markets and metric

- ANTARA HALDAR

Pope Francis redefined the papacy in profound ways. As the leader of the Catholic Church, he worked to make it more inclusive of women and the LGBTQ+ community. As the first Latin American pontiff, he became a voice for the Global South. And by taking his name — and inspiration — from St. Francis of Assisi, he positioned himself as a champion of the poor and marginalized.

One of the most surprising — and often overlooked — aspects of Francis' 12-year papacy was his emergence as an incisive economic visionary. In a world where economics is dominated by models, markets, and metrics, Francis insisted on a different standard: A moral one.

Throughout his papacy, Francis consistently challenged the assumptions of today's prevailing economic orthodoxy. In his 2013 exhortation Evangelii Gaudium ("The Joy of the Gospel"), he issued a stinging rebuke of what he called "an economy of exclusion and inequality" — a system that, as he put it, "kills."

Unlike many critics of capitalism, however, Francis did not call for its outright rejection. He adopted a more pragmatic approach, urging economic thinkers to ask deeper, more fundamental questions: What sort of markets do we want? Who should govern them, and to what end? His was a call to rethink not just our economic policies, but also the priorities that shape them.