Recontextualizing Social Teaching

On November 13, 2025, Pope Leo XIV shared a message with the members of the Industrial Organization of Argentina, a patronal union. In his message, the new pontiff said that the economy is not “an end in itself, but an essential—yet partial—aspect of the social fabric in which God’s plan of love for every human being unfolds.” This statement was in line with some of his other interventions on the subject. Speaking to Crux in July, shortly after his election, the pope said that the “continuously wider gap between the income levels of the working class and the money that the wealthiest receive” frightened him. More importantly, in his first major document, the apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te, the pope said, “We need to be increasingly committed to resolving the structural causes of poverty.”

In any other circumstances, these words would barely raise an eyebrow; but we live in extraordinary circumstances. The risk of misunderstanding is sharp, as pontifical ideas on social teaching—and on economics overall—are met with suspicion. Investigating the “structural causes of poverty” sounds far too lefty. The sharp divide between interventionism and liberalism (and the association of economic liberalism with moral conservatism) has made more observant Catholics unwittingly wary of discourses that try to explain why people are poor. Better yet, poverty has a reason to exist: we don’t let the economy run itself, as liberals prescribe. Yet, I’d make a case that this wariness is partially unfounded. Most papal interventions do follow sound economic and theological principles. We simply are too unsure to see them.

Reading Recent Documents

While Benedict XVI and John Paul II dealt with social teaching, it was Pope Francis who made a banner out of the topic. However, he gave the topic his personal spin. The bulwark of his social teaching is Laudato Si’ (2015). The problem is that as some commentators noted it criticizes the excesses of capitalism—like most papal interventions on the issue—its thoroughly “ecological” language was unsettling.

This is unfortunately not a new situation. Since Vatican II, Catholic social teaching has been a minefield. The subject of social justice, which lies at the heart of Catholic social teaching, has essentially become the province of left-leaning ideologies. From the 1960s on, with some exceptions (essentially Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio, John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus and Veritatis Splendor, Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate), most writing on the topic walked the path of diplomacy. The exception is likely Paul VI’s encyclical; yet when compared with previous documents—Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno above all—it is less practical in its approach. That is perhaps only natural. But the net result is that the doctrinal element of social teaching was passed on to the clergy.

This situation leaves Catholics in a delicate predicament. What is it that the Church teaches about social doctrine? When we read Pope Francis’ utterances about money being the “dung of the devil,” was he innovating or was that sound Church teaching? It sounds revolutionary, but it isn’t.

Yesterday and Today

The great difference between the times of Quadragesimo Anno to now, at least in social teaching, is that in 1931 the Church wasn’t compelled to choose a side in the capitalist–socialist binary. She was her own “third way.” In fact, in the early decades of the last century, Catholics had three articulated economic models: the influential German Solidarism, the famous Anglo Distributism, and the Spanish traditionalist Sociedalism. While each of these has their similarities and distinctions, all of them are grounded on the idea of the social.

Today, mentioning the word “social” sends shivers up and down the spine of many Catholics as some questionable political and theological ideologies have hijacked that word. That wasn’t the case back then. When Pius XI wrote that if “wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power” only “the strongest” will survive, very few Catholics would say he was being “leftist,” regardless if segued by claiming the “survival of the fittest” model is “the unlimited freedom of struggle among competitors”—a sharp rebuttal of laissez faire economics.

Thus, from a doctrinal and even methodological standpoint, the general criticism on Western economics the Church leveled with Francis (and now with Leo XIV) is sound. It’s the same as Leo XIII’s and Pius XI’s. While there’s no denying that his ecological stance warrants suspicion (and on this plenty of authors have written), the criticism of capitalism from him or any other is not “political, economic and worldly in the manner of a leftist politician,” as the late, great Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., wrote.

So why do we think it is?

The Two Heads of the Problem

As I alluded to above, after the 1960s the Church consistently abandoned the theoretical approach to economics. While it’s easy to frame Vatican II as the sole culprit, the reality isn’t so simple. By the time the Council began, the West experienced an unprecedented economic miracle, widening the middle class as never before. In America, home to some of the largest third-way movements in the world—like the Catholic Worker Movement and the Catholic Rural Movement—Irish and Italian immigrant families were mostly assimilated into what Will Herberg named the “triple melting pot.” They even put an Irish Catholic man in the presidency. The grievances about inequality were echoes from a distant past. That was then, this is now.

The second head of the problem, in my view, was the pastoral turn of Vatican II. While it’s true that by 1962 third-way economics were a spent political force (Chesterton had been dead for 26 years; Belloc had been dead for nine, but his last major economics book was from 1934), scholarly Catholic debate was as hot as anything. The pastoral turn hindered the necessary hierarchical direction for the debate. Compounding this, the sharp magisterial criticism on essential aspects of capitalism is easily hijacked by unsound political opinions, so it is hardly surprising that collective charity and social justice were undermined by politics. That is the case with the Theology of Liberation. By the time the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued its censure on the movement, the damage was done.

Is There a Path Forward?

Regardless of these problems, the Church has been very consistent on her social and economic teaching. According to John Finnis—for many, the greatest living authority on natural law—usury is still a sin. The problem is that no one talks about that anymore. Thus the shock when Leo XIV crafted a sharp message condemning usury in late 2025: “It is a grave sin, at times very grave.” In doing so, the pope kicked the hornets’ nest, as usury was considered by none other than Fr. Heinrich Pesch, S.J., one of the driving forces behind Rerum Novarum, a basilar component of capitalism. (Ironically, the closest thing we got to a contemporary condemnation of usury was Laudato Si’’s sections on “debt,” though Benedict XVI used the word in Caritas in Veritate.)

Therefore, things are less a matter of what Rome is saying but of how it is saying it. While recent documents are framed in very troubling ways, the basis of their social theology is sound. Pope Leo’s blunt assertion in Dilexi Te that “pseudo-scientific data are invoked to support the claim that a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty” is very close to Pius XI’s assertion that “free competition…clearly cannot direct economic life.” Besides, Fr. Pesch was far more incendiary in the nineteenth century: “[I]n our time, we use the word capitalism to mean a social system where usury operates with more or less complete freedom.”

It is essential that Catholics (even those in the clergy) understand that the 20th century is over. The left–right and liberal–socialist binaries don’t apply to the Church. The Church is a civilizational matrix. She doesn’t need economic teachings to solve the world’s problems. But we need to truly recover what she has said about society’s problems. Many Catholics, undoubtedly full of good intentions, try to make papal interventions fit their own worldview. It’s the case for those who read Rerum Novarum and focus squarely on Leo XIII’s defense of private property.

The path forward is not a repudiation of recent statements but their recontextualization within the deeper, richer tapestry of Catholic thought. It requires a deliberate intellectual project: to exhume, translate, and apply the forgotten models of Solidarism, Sociedalism, and Distributism to a 21st-century global economy. Pope Leo XIV’s provocative words on usury are not a rupture but an invitation: a recall to doctrine. Our task is to rebuild the intellectual architecture that makes sense of that call.