
Clergymen attend a rosary prayer outside Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica, the late Pope Francis's final resting place, a day prior to the Pope's funeral, on April 25, in Rome, Italy.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Six months after Argentina’s Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis in March, 2013, a highly unusual gathering took place at the Vatican. It received virtually no media coverage despite its high-profile guests – in the business sense, that is.
Inside the simple offices of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the Vatican department that dealt with earthly matters such as promoting human rights, were the chief executives of some of the world’s biggest mining companies, among them Rio Tinto, Anglo American, Newmont Mining and AngloGold Ashanti.
The bosses, who ran companies with well more than US$100-billion of collective market value, were invited by Justice and Peace for “a day of reflection with the mining industry.” Pope Francis sent them a message saying he hoped the meeting would lead to “a process guided by moral principles which sees the good for all parties involved in the sector,” by which he presumably meant employees, their homelands and the environment, too, not just the companies’ shareholders and executives.
I was the only reporter at the postconference open chat (media relations is not the Vatican’s forte). Rio Tinto’s then CEO, Sam Walsh, told me the event’s goal was “to open a dialogue where mining interfaces with the community … to hear other views with the promise of all of us making a difference.”
Unbeknownst to those of us in the room, we had stumbled into a session whose theme – inclusive capitalism – would help define Francis’s 12-year ministry, which ended with his death at 88 on Easter Monday. Two months after the mining conference, Francis published his first apostolic exhortation, a papal document that delivers a weighty pastoral message. It was called Evangelii Gaudium – The Joy of the Gospel – variously described by theologians and Vaticanologists as the “flagship document” of Francis’s papacy and the “Magna Carta for Church reform.”
The document came as a shock. It was blunt, provocative, fresh – a challenge to a hoary old Church bound by clericalism, bureaucracy, formality and remoteness and hobbled by Catholics who act like “sourpusses” (to use the official Vatican translation) and their rather inattentive treatment of the poor. Of course, Francis knew that good Catholics have compassion for the poor, but feeling sorry for the downtrodden wasn’t enough, as far as he was concerned. He wanted Catholics to advocate for them, to be vigilant on their behalf. “None of us can think we are exempt from concern for the poor and for social justice,” he wrote.

A portrait of the late Pope Francis is seen during a mass in his honour at the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Jose on April 25.EZEQUIEL BECERRA/AFP/Getty Images
The mining bosses were, in effect, introduced to an early version of that message. “The Pope was in favour of capitalism in service of the people,” Canada’s Michael Czerny, the Canadian prelate who co-ordinated the Justice and Peace session, told me this week.
Evangelii Gaudium is wide-ranging, but there was no doubt that the excesses of capitalism were one of the document’s urgent themes, even if the word “capitalism” never appeared in the 47,000-word text. Francis was not a scholar like his predecessor, the German-born Pope Benedict XVI, but he was thoughtful, political in a subtle sense – and the master of the sound bite.
“How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” he asked in the exhortation.
And: “Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded.”
And then the words that resonated around the world: “Today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.” Even the Vatican’s men and women in robes were impressed by the hard-hitting message. “An ‘economy that kills’ is a spectacular quote,” Cardinal Czerny said.
The quote triggered predictable responses, especially in the United States.
Rush Limbaugh, the late conservative radio shock jock, dismissed Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium as “pure Marxism,” as if it were an assault on the American way of life. Stephen Moore, economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, told the BBC: “It’s unquestionable that he has a very vocal skepticism [about] capitalism and free enterprise and … I find that to be very troubling.”
The alarm of the conservative right seemed to be confirmed when Raul Castro, then President of Cuba and leader of the country’s Communist Party, praised Francis’s critique of laissez-faire capitalism. “If the Pope continues this way, I will go back to praying and go back to the church,” he said. “I am not joking.”
Francis was neither a Marxist nor a communist; he was critical of both political-economic systems, especially the former if it used violence to pursue the class struggle. He did not endorse or condemn any economic model. What he opposed was unchecked economic liberalism. While truly unchecked capitalism does not exist anywhere, he probably was referring to the light-touch economic model prevalent in the U.S. and Europe that created an ever-wider gap between the rich and everyone else.
Francis must have been aware that market economies have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, as has been the case in China in recent decades. At the same time, he believed that capitalism was not necessarily governed by moral rules, to the point that “the worship of the ancient golden calf … has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money.”
How he came to this view is an open question. My own theory is that he saw the downside of the Peronist economic model that he lived through in Argentina, where he spent most of his religious career before becoming Pope.
Peronism is a highly complicated political and economic model that mixes elements of socialism, fascism and capitalism into an often-contradictory hodgepodge. It didn’t work, certainly not in the wealth-creation sense. Argentina is the only developed country to ever be downgraded to developing status. A century ago, it was one of the 10 wealthiest countries, on par with the U.S. on some measures.
As a street priest, later archbishop of Buenos Aires, the future Pope Francis saw the burgeoning poverty rates (about 50 per cent in recent years) over the decades, as well as the lavish lifestyles of robber barons and cronies of the presidents, and may have concluded that unregulated capitalism was immoral, at best, and possibly a crime against humanity. Certainly he was wary of trickle-down economics, which, he wrote, “has never been confirmed by the facts, [and] expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power.”
Francis did not lay out cures, though he did plea for the state to take on an ethical responsibility “to safeguard and promote the common good of society.” In other words, use laws and regulations to spread the wealth more evenly for the well-being and dignity of the workers who produce that wealth in the factories, farms and service businesses around the world.
His message resonates as much or more than ever a dozen years after Evangelii Gaudium was published. Prime Minister Mark Carney, for one, cited the Vatican’s 2014 conference on creating a more inclusive economy in his statement on Francis’s death.
“He likened humanity to wine – rich, diverse, full of spirit – and the market to grappa – distilled, intense, and at times disconnected,” Mr. Carney said. “He called on us to ‘turn grappa back into wine,’ to reintegrate human values into our economic lives.”

The final resting place of Pope Francis
Forgoing the traditional practice of being interred in the Vatican
Grottoes beneath St. Peter’s, Pope Francis chose to be laid to
rest inside the Papal Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.
Pauline Chapel: Home to an icon
of the Virgin Mary, Salus Populi
Romani, said to have been
painted from life by Saint
Luke. Pope Francis visited
here often
Sacra Culla: Wooden
fragments believed to be
from the crib of the baby Jesus
Tomb of Bernini
Apse
POPE’S TOMB IN
NICHE BETWEEN
TWO CHAPELS
Sforza
Chapel
Sistine Chapel
(Chapel of the
Nativity)
Baptistry
FLOOR PLAN
Entrance
DETAIL
Villa Borghese
River Tiber
Santa Maria Maggiore
VATICAN CITY
ROME
ROME
1 km
the globe and mail, Source: graphic news; Today (NBC); The Catholic Network;
Papal Basilica of Santa maria maggiore; openstreetmap