The Catholic Church Is Focusing on the Wrong Crisis

On April 27, two Vatican dicasteries—the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life—published a joint document aimed at raising awareness among Catholic families about an issue which, according to the dicasteries themselves, represents an urgent crisis both for the world and for the Church itself.

This urgent crisis for the Vatican dicasteries is the ecological crisis. For this reason, the text goes so far as to suggest that a Catholic family, in order truly to be such, cannot exempt itself from educating its members in ecological respect. Indeed, that the very concept of Catholic spirituality includes an “integral ecological” consciousness. 

The authors, referring to the environmentalist magisterium of Pope Francis—particularly the manifesto-encyclical Laudato si’ and the exhortation Laudate Deum—as well as to Pope Leo XIV’s first apostolic exhortation Dilexi te, which presents itself as a development of them, maintain that the crisis in question concerns not only the natural environment but also the human one. By this, they intend to refer to the widespread economic crisis, that is, the dramatic condition of poverty affecting the majority of humanity.

The most recent estimates indicate that about two billion people—concentrated mainly in the Global North—enjoy conditions of relative well-being, while the remaining six billion live in situations of poverty, disease, and ignorance; of these, about one billion live in extreme poverty. This asymmetry generates a structural migratory pressure from the south to the north, only partly spontaneous, fueled by the idea—more ideological than real—that entry into economically prosperous societies automatically entails an improvement in living conditions.

In recent years, the Catholic Church seems to have embraced this vision. Yet the history of humanity shows that simple integration into efficient social structures is not enough to lift poor migrants out of their condition. Poverty is in fact a complex and multidimensional phenomenon: not merely economic or political, but above all mental and cultural. 

This latter aspect remains a taboo, difficult to address calmly—in the West as elsewhere—because it is considered politically incorrect. Whoever attempts to discuss it is often accused of claiming, simplistically, that the poor are poor ‘by choice’ and therefore deserve to remain so. But this simplification is misleading and prevents a serious analysis of the problem. 

Unfortunately, this fallacious objection seems to have entered the lexicon of the Catholic Church as well, if one considers what Pope Leo XIV states in the exhortation Dilexi te: “Nor, for most of them, is poverty a choice. Yet, there are those who still presume to make this claim, thus revealing their own blindness and cruelty.” 

To understand the Catholic Church’s current position on the issue, it is necessary to look back at the teachings of Francis, who brought into Church language ideas associated with environmentalism and international governance—concepts that were largely developed in institutions such as the UN and the European Union.

As mentioned above, according to Francis, the environmental crisis and the global economic crisis are two sides of the same coin. The conclusion drawn is that the cause of both is one and the same, namely a poor or even absent distribution of resources and wealth on a global level. Francis spoke of a “technocratic and utilitarian paradigm” that reduces man to a consumer and nature to a resource. In other words, there are many poor people because there are few rich people, who sustain a political system that prevents an effective and constant redistribution of wealth to all sectors of the world’s population, so that “no one may be left behind.” This, in extreme summary, is the diagnosis.

Given these premises, the suggested therapy that follows is evident. The political class must direct the economy at the local, national, and global levels in such a way as to force ‘bad capitalists’ to surrender their ‘superfluous’ wealth to be distributed among all men. By doing so, everyone would enjoy what is necessary to live well. Obviously, Francis did not put it in such stark terms; he spoke of a personal ecological conversion “adequately accompanied by institutions.”

A first element to note in this regard is that the social doctrine of the Church proposed by Francis differs profoundly from the traditional one, developed from Leo XIII to Benedict XVI through John Paul II. The latter recognized market freedom as the engine not only of economic development but also of the human development of societies. Such freedom, however, presupposed that economic actors obeyed the ethical criterion underlying every human relationship—the natural law—which theology also expresses by condemning certain social sins: defrauding workers of their just wage, exploitation and oppression of those unable to defend themselves, and so forth.

This principle has frequently been confused by the modern mentality that tends to overlap morality and politics. Thus, for many—including Catholics—subordinating the economy to morality would mean subordinating it to politics, that is, to the state, and thus the problem reappears.

The second element is that Francis’s diagnosis and therapy prove surprisingly naïve. Assuming, purely hypothetically, that the current global wealth were suddenly distributed in a perfectly equal manner among all the men and women on the planet, children included, each person would possess about fifty thousand dollars. A figure that, on paper, might seem ‘good,’ but which would guarantee neither lasting prosperity nor true equality.

Wealth, in fact, is not a static quantity to be divided up; it is the dynamic product of productive processes, voluntary exchanges, and widespread knowledge. Without these mechanisms—which presuppose economic freedom, private property, and price calculation—wealth would cease to exist.

Francis’s vision, though animated by moral intentions, seems to ignore a fundamental principle of economics: wealth is not distributed; it is created. Every attempt to correct inequalities through political intervention or global planning ends up destroying the mechanisms that generate real prosperity—the free market, private property, economic calculation based on prices. 

Every time a political institution intervenes directly in the economy, the system loses the capacity to coordinate information and incentives. Prices cease to reflect real scarcity, investments become distorted, productivity declines, and the poverty one intended to combat is amplified.

In this sense, the “ecological conversion” proposed by Francis, if accompanied by institutions imposing redistributions and limits on economic freedom, would not produce greater opportunities for all, but merely a leveling downward. Economic equality does not elevate the poor—it simply impoverishes everyone. The final paradox is that, in the attempt to moralize so-called capitalism, one ends up politicizing it, and therefore destroying its creative function. Precisely what we are witnessing in these years.

The third element to emphasize is therefore the historical-institutional context in which all these theoretical categories were born and developed. These are not concepts matured within the classical tradition of Catholic social doctrine, but paradigms elaborated primarily in genuinely technocratic environments, namely supranational ones such as the UN, the European Union, private foundations, and international agencies united by a common vision of global governance.

Concepts such as ‘integral sustainability,’ ‘ecological transition,’ ‘multilevel governance,’ or ‘climate conversion’ arise precisely in these contexts. And it is not difficult to understand their political function. Every time a crisis is defined as global, permanent, and morally absolute, the necessity of supranational structures capable of managing it is automatically created. Emergency thus becomes the foundation of new powers.

Contemporary ecological narrative, especially in its UN-EU formulations, does not simply aim to promote greater prudence in the use of resources but rather to legitimize a progressive centralization of power. In the name of climate salvation, emissions reduction, or ‘environmental justice,’ increasingly pervasive limitations on freedom are justified, including the educational freedom of families.

The logic is always the same: since the problem is planetary, no community—not even a local one—can address it alone. It therefore becomes necessary to transfer competences to unelected technocratic bodies, progressively removing fundamental decisions from ordinary political deliberation and from the direct responsibility of peoples. Global governance is the true implicit horizon of these theories.

Whoever dissents is not simply considered mistaken, but accused of irresponsibility toward the planet, toward the poor, or even toward future generations. The technical issue therefore assumes the features of a new universal civil morality increasingly embraced by the Church.

The fourth element—apparently paradoxical—is that this narrative proves functional not only to Western supranational powers, but also to authoritarian regimes such as the Chinese one, which for years has maintained an ambiguous yet strategically advantageous relationship with UN institutions. 

Communist China has perfectly understood that the global technocratic paradigm can be used as an instrument of control and planning. It is no coincidence that Beijing is often presented as a model of efficiency, despite being one of the most repressive political systems. The Chinese system in fact shows in extreme form what many Western democracies now tend to realize gradually: a society administered by technical apparatuses, digitally monitored, regulated through credits, incentives, restrictions, and capillary surveillance.

With Francis first and Leo XIV today, one witnesses an extremely accommodating attitude of the Vatican toward Beijing, especially considering the persecutions against Catholics. The deeper reasons for such an attitude remain partly obscure, but it is difficult not to notice at least a partial consonance on the level of general political vision: primacy of global structures, distrust toward the market, centrality of planning, and growing subordination of concrete freedoms to collective objectives defined from above. 

The final result is that the contemporary Church risks concentrating a large part of its moral and pastoral energies without fighting the real crisis, namely the spiritual crisis of contemporary man.