The late Pope Francis and the soul of economics

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 marginalised.

- Antara Haldar

One of the most surprising — and often-overlooked — aspects of Francis's 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.

In his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ (“Praise Be to You”), Francis went further, integrating ecological and economic critiques into a unified moral vision. Climate degradation, he argued, is not merely a “negative externality” to be managed; it is the inevitable outcome of an economy that commodifies nature and marginalises the poor. Viewed through this lens, economics and ecology are not separate academic fields but intertwined arenas of moral responsibility. “The earth herself,” he wrote, “is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor”.