Abstract

Strong denunciations of the capitalist system have become one of the most controversial aspects of the early years of Pope Francis’s pontificate, reverberating far and wide. This article places these statements in context. After elucidating the economic role of the pontiff as a religious leader, the text identifies the two core elements in his approach—the universal destination of goods and the preference for the poor—as basic and traditional concepts of the Church’s social doctrine. The economic teachings of Francis are then described in a tripartite structure called “the economic canon of the pope.”