From the headlines and news tags, you’d have thought Pope Francis was a social justice warrior. To be sure, he was a “mold breaker” who emphasized “inclusion and care for the marginalized over doctrinal purity” and a “modernizer” who distinguished his papacy from the conservative positions that had steered the Church under John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
But another way of thinking about the Jesuit Pope’s mission is to see how it was planted in deep Christian doctrines and practices.
When Francis inspired the world with gestures of humility and acts of Christian love—washing the feet of prisoners or of Muslim immigrants, for example—he was not being “radical” or innovative. In picture-perfect performances for the age of memes, he was meticulously reenacting ancient traditions of Christian iconography, which were themselves the condensed images of spiritual teachings.
Religious conservatives received his query, “Who am I to judge?” as a provocation, and perhaps it was. But Francis understood how his refusal to judge gay people resonated with liturgical and scriptural sources going back to the gospels. “I was paraphrasing by heart the Catechism of the Catholic Church,” the pope explained, “where it says that these people should be treated with delicacy and not be marginalized.”
Similarly, Francis rebutted JD Vance’s expressly anti-immigrant and implicitly ethnonationalist assertions about the “order of love,” not by directing the U.S. Vice President to his nearest HR office, but by inviting him to meditate on Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan. That parable’s message has challenged believers for two millennia. It tells us that our neighbors are not necessarily members of our own ethnic group, those who think or worship like us, but those who undertake acts of kindness and charity.
The pope’s encyclical on capitalism provided a wide-ranging indictment of untrammeled markets, social inequality, social abandonment, and right-wing populism. Surely, it was informed by more contemporary ideas about the ecological crisis and instrumental rationality. But in tilting against a “deified market,” Francis expressed ideas about the order of social relations that predate capitalism and are older than modernity.
It would be a stretch to suggest that Francis was a socialist, although there is much for socialists to glean from his teachings about compassion, solidarity, and openness. One might better place him in the robust tradition of Christian humanism. The renewed salience of that tradition might prod us to reflect on the Church’s relationship to socialism.
To begin with, the Acts of the Apostles tell us clearly that the early Christians lived a communal life:
[T]hey had all things common. And … great grace was upon them all. Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, And laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.
Variations on the derived phrase, “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs,” was circulated among Christian socialists and early materialists until it famously found a home in Marx’s description of communism.
A long tradition of medieval peasant revolts in Europe sought to overturn the exploitative world order. The Christian roots of these pre-modern movements are chronicled in Norman Cohn’s classic study, The Pursuit of the Millennium. At the end of the 12th century, the Calabrian abbot and hermit Joachim de Fiore emerged as the foremost articulator of Christian messianic socialism. His prophecies, later systematized by Franciscan abbots, influenced similar movements across Europe, and put down roots in popular culture.
In the period of Feudalism’s long decay, Joachite prophecies intermingled with anticlerical, antipapal, and revolutionary movements until a wave of revolutionary ferment swept 15th century Germany. These movements took as their aim the abolition of private property, the leveling of social classes, and the establishment of an egalitarian millennium. The proliferation of such movements prefigured the Protestant Reformation and helped set the stage for The Great Peasant War of 1525, which Thomas Muntzer believed would bring about a state in which all would be equal and each would receive according to his need.
Philosophically, Marx carefully tried to derive socialism from humanism via atheism; the real-world story involves a complex millennial history. The Church is where socialism was born. Socialist ideas found their purchase there up until the birth of secular socialisms. Occasionally, socialist ideas were in the mainstream of Christianity, sometimes they were at its margins, and often they were suppressed by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Premodern Christian socialist movements set the template, ultimately, for Marx's thoughts about broad epochs of world history culminating in socialism. And then, in the mid-20th century, liberation theology took up again and renewed this unofficial but not-very hidden tradition.
One would have thought that this tradition was dead, definitively killed off by John Paul and Benedict—to say nothing of the U.S.-backed death squads in Central America. When he was installed as pope, Francis seemed poised to continue the conservative line. But instead, he lifted the interdictions against the theology of hope. And something of it dawned again in the beneficent smile and instructive words and deeds of Francis, who ministered to the poor at a time when the working class had been routed, defeated, driven from the stage of world history.
What comes next is anybody's guess. Francis himself came as a surprise.
