The Market Is Not a God:
Why the Next Pope Must Not Be a Capitalist Chaplain
When a recent headline declared that “The next pope should be more accepting of free markets,” it said more than its authors likely intended. On the surface, it appears to offer a reasonable suggestion, perhaps aimed at balance or pragmatism. But beneath the headline lies a deeper message: that the Catholic Church should retreat from its critique of economic injustice, stay in its lane, and offer spiritual comfort while the gears of capitalism turn untouched.
It is, in effect, a call to neuter the prophetic voice of the Church. And to those who insist on such a shift, one must ask: is one seeking a pope or a portfolio manager?
The Push for a “Safer” Pope
The call for a “safer” pope — one more palatable to Western powers, more deferential to capitalist orthodoxy, and more “neutral” in tone — is not just a superficial preference for style or personality. It is a deeply political demand, cloaked in the language of decorum and doctrinal purity. It seeks not merely a return to a less confrontational papacy but a redefinition of the Church’s moral compass in alignment with dominant global systems.
Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has broken from many conventions. His papacy marked a shift from the Eurocentric, institutionally rigid Vatican to a more pastoral, globally conscious leadership grounded in the lived realities of the poor and marginalized. As the first Latin American pope and a member of the Jesuit order — itself long associated with critical intellectualism, social justice, and missionary work in the Global South — Francis brought to the papal office a voice formed not in the salons of Rome but in the barrios of Buenos Aires.
His critiques of the global economy have been especially stark and unapologetic. In Evangelii Gaudium, the 2013 apostolic exhortation that effectively set the tone for his pontificate, Francis declared: “An economy of exclusion and inequality... such an economy kills.” He denounced a system that worships profit over people, that disposes of human beings as easily as plastic waste, that sanctifies unfettered growth while entire populations remain hungry and displaced. This is not merely rhetorical flourish; it is theological indictment. He challenges not just policies but the idols of modernity: consumerism, materialism, and the false salvation promised by the invisible hand of the market.
To Western elites — in politics, finance, and even some corners of the Church — this has been disquieting. The myth of the market as benevolent and morally neutral is one many have built careers defending. The narrative that capitalism, especially in its neoliberal form, is inherently good because it lifts people out of poverty is repeated so often that to question it feels almost heretical in secular political discourse. Yet Francis does precisely that — and he does so not from a Marxist manifesto, but from the Gospel.
Thus, the desire for a “less political” pope is, at its core, an effort to blunt the Church’s prophetic edge. It is an attempt to reduce Christianity to a therapeutic faith of personal piety and moral platitudes, rather than a revolutionary force that speaks truth to empire. Such a vision of the Church is less a beacon of the Kingdom of God than a chaplaincy for the global order — a quiet hand resting on the shoulder of power, offering comfort without challenge.
To ask for a pope who is “more accepting of free markets” is to ask for a dilution of Catholic social teaching — a tradition that, from Rerum Novarum to Laudato Si’, has always insisted that economic systems must serve human dignity, not the other way around. It is to prefer compliance over conscience, institutional calm over moral clarity.
Ultimately, this tension reflects a deeper question: What is the role of the Church in the world? Is it to accommodate the prevailing powers, or to challenge them with the radical call of the Gospel? Pope Francis has made his answer clear. And it is precisely because of that clarity — because he has refused to be a "safe" pope — that some now long for a return to the papacy as an ornament of power rather than its critic.
Faith as Private, Economics as Untouchable
At the heart of the push for a more “market-friendly” pope is a dangerous dichotomy — one that has long haunted Christian discourse. Religion, we are told, should concern itself with “faith,” narrowly defined as personal piety, inner peace, sacraments, and the afterlife. The Church may speak of sin, but only the private kind. Economics — wages, wealth, power, poverty — are to be left to the “experts,” as if they lay outside the reach of moral critique.
This logic is best captured by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who once declared, “Christianity is about spiritual redemption, not social reform.” The implication is clear: the Church’s role is to save souls, not question systems. It may offer charity, but not critique. It may comfort the afflicted, but not confront the structures that afflict them.
But this division is not biblical. It is ideological. And it is profoundly un-Christian, and un-Catholic.
Christ did not preach a disembodied faith. He healed the sick, fed the hungry, blessed the poor, and denounced the rich — not merely for their wealth, but for their indifference. He warned that one cannot serve both God and Mammon (Luke 16:13). He overturned the tables of the money changers (Matthew 21:12–13), not because he misunderstood economics, but because he understood morality. His teachings were soaked in economic language: debts, wages, vineyards, harvests, landowners and tenants, generosity and greed.
The early Church, too, lived out this integration of faith and economics. In Acts 2:44–45 and 4:32–35, we read that the believers “had everything in common” and distributed to anyone as they had need — not as a utopian ideal, but as a manifestation of the Kingdom of God breaking into the present.
This vision did not end with the apostles. It was carried forward by Catholic social teaching, beginning in earnest with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), which upheld the rights of workers and the duties of employers, warning that unchecked capitalism reduces laborers to “mere instruments.” Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931) went further, calling for a restructuring of the social order to promote justice and solidarity.
Pope John Paul II, while more cautious in his embrace of markets, warned in Centesimus Annus (1991) of the danger of capitalism becoming an ideology — a system that treats human beings as consumers and labor as a commodity. The market, he said, must be evaluated not by profit margins but by how it serves the dignity of the human person.
Pope Benedict XVI, in Caritas in Veritate (2009), emphasized that the economy must be guided by an “ethics which is people-centered” (§45). Without this, markets “collapse,” and globalization becomes a “grave risk” to the most vulnerable.
Pope Francis has made this tradition unmistakably clear. In Evangelii Gaudium (2013), he warned against the “absolute autonomy of markets” and decried an “economy of exclusion” that “kills” (§53). In Laudato Si’ (2015), he linked environmental destruction to the same economic logic that exploits labor and discards the poor. And in Fratelli Tutti (2020), he lamented how neoliberalism offers “magic theories of ‘spillover’ or ‘trickle’” that never materialize, urging instead a politics of fraternity and care.
So when some insist that Christianity ought to stick to “spiritual redemption” and leave “social reform” to others, they do not defend orthodoxy. They defend comfort. They reduce the Gospel to therapy and strip it of its prophetic force. Christianity is not merely a message of personal salvation. It is a summons to conversion — personal, yes, but also structural, social, and political.
To demand that the Church ignore the economy is not neutrality. It is complicity.
The Global Church vs. the Prosperity Gospel
This comparison between the global Catholic Church and the prosperity gospel movement in the Global North reveals not only a theological divide but a civilizational one — between two competing visions of what it means to be Christian in a world riven by inequality, displacement, and consumerism.
Critics of Pope Francis and the institutional Church often seize on moments of financial scandal or lavish spending as proof that the Vatican — and by extension, Catholicism — is hypocritical, out of touch, or morally compromised. Indeed, the Church is not immune to corruption; it is composed of human beings, and its vast global footprint has at times enabled abuse of power and fiscal mismanagement. But this critique is often weaponized in bad faith, failing to distinguish between the Church's institutional complexity and its deeper moral and pastoral mission.
The Catholic Church is not merely a religious symbol; it is a sprawling global network of infrastructure that provides humanitarian support in places most governments and NGOs will not go. Catholic charities are often first on the ground in conflict zones, disaster areas, and refugee camps. Church-run hospitals, clinics, orphanages, and schools sustain life for millions who have no access to state or market-based services. These operations require funding. They necessitate real estate, investment portfolios, logistical networks, and yes, bureaucracy. These are not luxuries — they are lifelines. The Church’s wealth, when directed faithfully, is not accumulated for ostentation, but mobilized for mission.
This is a world apart from the theology of the prosperity gospel, which has metastasized in certain corners of evangelical Christianity, particularly in the United States, parts of Latin America, Africa, and increasingly, Southeast Asia. The prosperity gospel teaches that God rewards faithfulness with material wealth — that if you pray harder, believe more deeply, and tithe generously, you will be blessed financially. Conversely, poverty and illness are framed as signs of weak faith, spiritual failure, or divine punishment. This theology turns suffering into a moral defect and transforms pastors into celebrity CEOs.
It is no coincidence that this ideology has flourished in neoliberal economies that celebrate consumer choice, self-optimization, and entrepreneurial hustle. In such a context, the market is not just tolerated — it is divinized. Megachurches become architectural spectacles of excess, and televangelists preach abundance from private jets. This version of Christianity doesn’t challenge systemic injustice; it baptizes it. It tells the rich they are righteous and the poor that their struggle is their own fault.
When critics call for a Church that is less critical of capitalism and more focused on individual piety, they are, whether knowingly or not, gesturing toward this prosperity-driven theology. They want a faith that soothes the conscience without disturbing the system. But Catholicism, at its best, refuses this trade-off. It insists that salvation is not a product and that dignity is not contingent on wealth. From the Sermon on the Mount to the encyclicals of modern popes, Catholic social teaching has offered a radical alternative: that the measure of a society is how it treats its poor, that the economy must serve the common good, and that faith means solidarity, not self-enrichment.
The critics of Francis are not just critiquing a man or a policy shift — they are resisting a theological stance that threatens their comfort. They want a pope who confirms their worldview, not one who disrupts it. But the Gospel has always been disruptive. And if the Church is to remain faithful to it, then it cannot serve both God and mammon.
The Question of Race and Power
The question of race and power within the Catholic Church — and within the broader backlash to Pope Francis — is one of the most underexamined yet fundamental dynamics at play. Though couched in theological or economic language, many of the criticisms leveled at the current pontificate are deeply entangled with issues of cultural supremacy, postcolonial anxiety, and discomfort with the shifting center of global Christianity.
For centuries, the image of the Church — especially in the minds of many in the West — was synonymous with Rome, Latin liturgy, and European intellectual tradition. The papacy itself was overwhelmingly Italian or at least European, with each successive pope seen not only as a spiritual father but as a steward of a civilizational legacy rooted in Greco-Roman thought, European art and philosophy, and colonial-era missionary expansion. Even as the Church’s missionary activity grew in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the Vatican remained the symbolic and administrative “head,” while the rest of the world played the role of recipient.
This legacy of Eurocentrism, though often unspoken, continues to shape the expectations of what the papacy should look like, sound like, and stand for. The elevation of Jorge Mario Bergoglio — a Jesuit from Argentina with Italian roots but Latin American formation — disrupted that narrative. His style was immediate and striking: shunning luxury, emphasizing humility, centering the peripheries, and advocating for those who have long lived under the heel of colonial and economic domination.
Francis didn’t just change the tone; he changed the lens. He began speaking not just about the poor but from the perspective of the poor. He foregrounded the voices of indigenous communities, defended migrants in motion across continents, and challenged ecological destruction not as an abstract issue but as a form of violence against the global poor — those who suffer first and worst from climate catastrophe. He invoked not the logic of empire, but the tradition of the prophets.
For some, particularly in the Global North, this has been profoundly unsettling. It is not simply that Francis talks about justice, but that he reframes whose pain matters. He shifts the center of moral gravity away from the marble halls of Europe and toward the barrios, the favelas, the refugee camps. In doing so, he disrupts a long-standing association between whiteness, Westernness, and theological authority.
This is where the politics of race and power come into sharp relief. When critics bemoan Francis’s “politicization” of the papacy, they are often reacting to the fact that the voices he uplifts — indigenous leaders, African theologians, Latin American campesinos — do not mirror the racial or cultural identity of the traditional Church elite. The discomfort is not just about what he says, but about who gets to speak.
And yet, this shift is not an aberration; it is the inevitable unfolding of the Church’s own claim to universality. Catholic means universal — not culturally uniform, not Western by default, but open to the whole world. In truth, the demographic center of Catholicism has already moved decisively southward. The most vibrant communities of faith, the highest rates of vocations, and the most active grassroots ministries are now found in places like the Philippines, Nigeria, Brazil, and Mexico — not France, Germany, or Italy.
To cling to the idea that the papacy must reflect “Western values” is to deny this reality. It is to imagine the Church as a cultural museum rather than a living, breathing community shaped by the needs and experiences of its global flock. Worse still, it is to implicitly suggest that leadership from the Global South is somehow less legitimate, less sophisticated, or less faithful — a belief rooted not in theology but in the racial hierarchies inherited from colonialism.
Francis’s papacy, then, is not simply a theological project. It is a geopolitical and cultural one — a deliberate re-centering of the margins, a challenge to the old order that once dictated not only who speaks for the Church, but who it speaks to.
In refusing to return to the comforts of Eurocentric orthodoxy, Francis is inviting the Church to become what it has always claimed to be: a communion of peoples, not empires; a home for the dispossessed, not a fortress for the powerful; and a global body where every voice, no matter how small or dark-skinned or distant from Rome, is part of the chorus.
Again, What Kind of Pope Does the World Need?
The world today does not need a pope who comforts the powerful. It needs one who consoles the broken, confronts the unjust, and refuses to make peace with systems that exploit. The next pope should not be chosen to flatter free markets or signal ideological alignment. He should be chosen because he understands the radical call of Christ: to lift the lowly, scatter the proud, and proclaim good news to the poor.
Or should say: "A Prophetic Church, Not a Compliant One". As the modern world, riven by inequality and ecological devastation, is in desperate need of moral clarity. In such a context, the papacy cannot afford to be neutral. The next pope must be chosen not for his ability to placate financial elites or soothe geopolitical anxieties, but for his willingness to bear witness — even at great cost — to the radical message of the Gospel.
As Pope Francis reminds us in Evangelii Gaudium (2013): “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.” (§53)
This is not rhetoric for its own sake. It is a theological judgment: an unjust economic system is a form of violence, and the Church must say so without apology. The next pope must continue — or deepen — this prophetic stance, lest the Church forfeit its soul for political expediency.
Perhaps, 'right' is the Conservatives, that the Church serves as 'conscience', not chaplain- for there is a dangerous temptation to reduce the Church to a ceremonial role in global capitalism — to make it a provider of moral cover for wealth accumulation, deregulation, and the quiet abandonment of the poor. But this is precisely the danger modern popes have warned against.
In Centesimus Annus (1991), Pope John Paul II — no enemy of markets, but no worshiper of them either — wrote: “It is not the Church’s task to propose economic and political systems or programs... but she does have the right and the duty to offer a moral judgment on economic and social matters, when the fundamental rights of the person or the salvation of souls requires it.” (§43)
The role of the Church is not to validate the status quo, but to scrutinize it. It must not become the chaplain of the global market — blessing its winners and ignoring its victims — but rather its conscience: unafraid to indict systems that produce exploitation, environmental ruin, or human despair. Markets can serve the common good — but they must be directed toward it. Left unchecked, the market becomes a false idol, promising salvation through consumption, meaning through status, and redemption through growth. The next pope must reject this idolatry, as his predecessors have done.
In Laudato Si’ (2015), Pope Francis is unequivocal: “The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) 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.” (§55)
The market, then, is not evil — but it is not holy either. It is a tool, not a god. The moment it becomes the measure of moral worth or divine favor, it demands a rebuke from the Church. The next pope must never act as its priest.
A Gospel for the Lowly: For A Dangerous Pope for Dangerous Times
The criteria for choosing a pope must not revolve around geopolitics, market friendliness, or cultural nostalgia. The next pope must be someone who understands that Christianity is not a philosophy of accommodation but a revolution of love — one that lifts the lowly, scatters the proud, and fills the hungry with good things (cf. Luke 1:52–53, the Magnificat).
This calling echoes through the encyclicals. In Populorum Progressio (1967), Pope Paul VI declared: “The hungry nations of the world cry out to the peoples blessed with abundance. And the Church, cut to the quick by this cry, asks each and every person to hear his brother’s plea and answer it lovingly.” (§3)
The next pope must embody this urgency — not merely for optics or diplomacy, but as a matter of salvation history. For the world does not need a cautious pope, a market-friendly pope, or a Western-pleasing pope. It needs a dangerous pope — dangerous to systems of exploitation, to economies that commodify, to ideologies that sanctify wealth while scapegoating the poor.
Such a pope would not comfort the powerful. He would console the broken, challenge the indifferent, and refuse to bless the machinery of profit over people.
The Church must not be a chaplain to Mammon. It must be its living contradiction.
For in the end, the market is not a god.
And the next pope must never be its priest.