After Francis

Plus, where’s the deregulation?; robot progress

In 2024 The Vatican released an illustration with Francis portraying “profit” as at odds with the “common good,” a message that sounds more like the latest rant from Oren Cass than something from a major American religion.

The percentage of American adults who identify as Catholic declined to 19 percent in 2023-2024, down from 21 percent in 2014 and from 24 percent in 2007, despite a historic boom in immigration from traditionally Catholic countries in Latin America, a recent Pew Research Center survey found.

Christianity generally in America has seen an even steeper decline over the same period, according to the Pew numbers.

Not helping to arrest the slide was Pope Francis, whose death was announced by the Vatican. Francis often sounded like an enemy of capitalism and of prosperity.

In his 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, or the Joy of the Gospel, Francis said, “some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. …. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase.”

Francis warned, “The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption. While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. …In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.”

In a February 5, 2020 speech, Francis said, “the 50 richest people in the world have a fortune estimated at $2.2 trillion. These 50 people by themselves could finance health care and education for every poor child in the world.” He denounced “repeated tax cuts for the wealthiest people” as the “structures of sin.”

Francis also tilted toward a pacifist view. “To be true followers of Jesus today also includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence, ”Francis said in a message for the celebration of the Fiftieth World Day of Peace, January 1, 2017. A 2022 Vatican document discouraged investing in the arms industry and quoted Francis contending that the mere possession of nuclear weapons is immoral. Francis called the war in Ukraine “sacrilegious.”

As we noted in March 2024 at the Editors (“Pope Francis Takes Aim at the Profit Motive”), the Vatican released illustrations portraying “profit” as at odds with the “common good,” a message that sounds more like the latest rant from Oren Cass than something from a major American religion.

Francis’s passing provides the Catholic Church an opportunity to adjust course—not to fit the latest political fashions or to avoid sometimes unpopular and timeless truths, but toward a more realistic understanding of the virtues and values of free markets and of the forces that defend them from their enemies. Those markets and armies protect religious liberty along with other freedoms. If the next Pope embraces them he will increase the likelihood that Catholicism in America returns to a trajectory of growth.

Where’s the deregulation? Donald Trump ran promising tax cuts and so far has delivered a tax increase in the form of tariffs but no tax cuts. He also ran promising deregulation and instead the business pages are full of stories like “The Federal Trade Commission's blockbuster antitrust case against Meta kicks off on Monday in a courtroom in Washington, D.C.” (April 13, 2025) and “The Justice Department is about to make its case for a Google breakup” (April 20, 2025).