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).

Meta/Facebook/Instagram’s Mark Zuckerberg just bought a $23 million Washington, D.C. mansion, with a spokesman telling Politico that “will allow Mark to spend more time there as Meta continues the work on policy issues related to American technology leadership.” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos already bought his own $23 million D.C. house and also owns the Washington Post.

President Trump, meanwhile, has his own social network (“Truth Social”) and his friend and adviser Elon Musk controls another social network, X, that in some ways competes with Google and Meta products.

The Republican Congress is also putting heat on those technology companies and their executives. Senator Hawley, Republican of Missouri, sent an April 10 letter to Zuckerberg, announcing it on X with a note that “it’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to come to Capitol Hill, take an oath, and answer to America for how he has sold out our country’s security for China profits.”

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, sent his own April 14, 2025 letter to Zuckerberg, with questions including, “From 2015 to the date of this letter, how many SEC investigations has Meta or its subsidiaries been subject to? For each SEC investigation, provide the basis and outcome.” Instead of rolling back the administrative state and its endless compliance campaigns against successful American businesses, Republican lawmakers are adding their own demands.

The Trump right has plenty of grievances against what they call “Big Tech,” ranging from the decisions to kick Trump off the platforms to “shadow-banning” and capricious demonetization that amounts to censorship of right-leaning accounts and outlets. But market competition and consumer choice are better remedies than political shakedowns. That’s true regardless of whether the politicians making the demands are Republicans or Democrats.

When it comes to regulating Meta/Facebook and Alphabet/Google, Trump has yet to deliver on the deregulation that he promised in the campaign. The administration is still in its early days. But if Trump was able to get the Justice Department to drop the case against the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, why can’t he cut some similar slack to the technology giants? Instead the Trump tech policy looks as heavyhanded as the Biden administration’s, but with more conflicts of interest. A measure of success in this department will be when technology moguls are selling houses in Washington, D.C. rather than acquiring them.

Robot progress: Two recent stories highlight the possibilities of robots to do work that used to require humans. In Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces and Israel Aerospace Industries have introduced an “Autonomous Combat Engineering System” or robotic version of Caterpillar’s D-9 armored bulldozer, the Jerusalem Post’s Seth Frantzman reports. He reports on a demonstration in which “the machine was controlled from the United States while it drove around in Israel.”

“The future of war is a large number of unmanned systems, from drones in the air to robotic vehicles to unmanned vessels, and perhaps even other types of robots surging forward into the battle zone, saving lives and enabling missions that used to be dangerous or complex,” he writes.

In the case of the “RobDozer,” this isn’t science fiction but has already been deployed and used repeatedly in Gaza for missions like clearing paths from booby-traps and improvised explosive devices.

Meanwhile, in Andover, Massachusetts, there’s a modular housing company called Reframe Systems that is using robotic arms to build walls of the sort that individual carpenters typically frame on construction sites. A photo indicates that the arm is made by Yaskawa, backed by Yaskawa Electric Corp. of Japan.

You don’t have to be a techno-utopian to see the potential here, especially in a world where Trump tariffs make U.S.-based manufacturing relatively more attractive, Trump immigration enforcement makes U.S. labor relatively more scarce, and the hangover of Democratic governance—increased minimum wages, expensive health insurance—makes U.S.-based labor relatively expensive. If your construction site can be cleared by an unmanned bulldozer and then your house can be remotely built by a robot arm, perhaps progress can be made toward making housing more affordable for would-be homeowners who are now renting.