By Gaël Giraud, SJ | Environmental Justice Program (EJP), Georgetown University, Washington DC
[From “Jesuits 2024 – The Society of Jesus in the world”]

A call to invent a new model of economics, not based on capital markets but on a non-violent relationship between human beings and nature, for the benefit of all.

“Such an economy kills.” (Evangelii Gaudium § 53). Pope Francis has said it many times: the economy of deregulated and globalized capital markets that we have built over the last half century not only does not allow for an efficient allocation of our resources but also increases inequality and ultimately kills the disenfranchised. Global warming, the destruction of biodiversity, the universal invasion of plastic, the depletion of a certain number of critical minerals are some of the existential challenges that we must collectively address if we want to prove wrong the climate scientists who now evoke the possibility of the extinction of humanity in the next century.

In the short term, we must face a major food crisis that is being prepared, reinforced by the disruption of the fresh water cycle: by 2030, only 3 out of 5 humans will have access to drinking water. We can survive without electricity but no one can live without water.

Those of us who are reassured on the grounds that humanity has “always found the means to get by” are telling themselves fables. We now know that the negligence of colonial administrations at the end of the 19^th century with regard to the consequences of the El Niño climatic phenomenon had probably already caused the death of 50 million people in the countries of the South. The challenge is not to repeat this tragedy and to invent a path towards ecological sustainability that does not involve the elimination of the less fortunate.

But the roots of the problem are deep. Laudato si’, Fratelli Tutti and Querida Amazonia, from Pope Francis, pose a diagnosis of an anthropological and spiritual nature that, for my part, I would formulate in the following way: Westerners have to free themselves from the naturalistic anthropology that has invaded the imaginations of all those who are subject to market globalization. This anthropology, partly unconscious and which has been imposed in Europe since the 17^th century, makes us believe that humanity possesses the unique privilege of an interiority that makes it the imago Dei in the face of an inert, unconscious, deaf and dumb nature. Consequently, this ontology legitimizes a violent, domineering, patriarchal, colonial and carnivorous interpretation of the dominium terrae spoken of in Genesis 1:28.

As Pope Francis reminded us during the audience of 3 September 2020, it is this same dominating anthropology that justifies violence against women, the fascination for financial markets, the destruction of ecosystems, the crimes perpetrated against children and the elderly.

Our inability to enter into a non-violent relationship with otherness betrays our inability to enter into a peaceful relationship with the Other. In other words, the economy that kills is, at bottom, a practical atheism (sometimes lived by the “pious faithful”). In this sense, to invent a new economy is to contribute at the same time to the four Universal Apostolic Preferences of the Society of Jesus.

How can this be done? In the same way that ecclesial synodality requires first of all listening to the sensus fidei fidelium, inventing a new economy today undoubtedly requires first of all putting oneself in the school of those who know much more about the economy of life than our learned economists. The ukama (in the Shona language) or the ubuntu (in Cameroon) speak of a relational cosmology that encases each human being in a web of relationships with ecosystems, ancestors, future generations… Teranga in Senegal is a tradition of hospitality that inscribes messianic hospitality in the banality of daily life, a mark of consent to welcome the Other in the other. The buen vivir of Latin American traditions traces an alternative path to the maximization of capital returns. The Hindu swaradj points out that this also involves self-limitation of the self and of the group to which I belong…

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, it was the companions of the First Society who, by telling the European elites how the Indian societies of North America had organized themselves without money, without capital and without a dictator, gave rise to the Age of Enlightenment and to the modern idea of a democracy that was not based on slavery.

The Society of Jesus can recover this inspiration by listening to the wisdom of the people who today are the first victims of the financialized economy of deregulated capital markets. The contribution of Jesuits to the “Laudato Si’ Action Platform” initiative, from the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, is a step in this direction – e.g., what some universities like Loyola Chicago are trying to do with Healing Earth. As well as the “Economy of Francesco” and the thousand young people from all over the world who are working and thinking about inventing the economy of tomorrow.

How long will we continue to teach the doctrine of “the economy that kills”, which Pope Francis himself reminds us in Evangelii Gaudium § 54 has no scientific basis? If we want our institutions to be part of the solution, then they must stop contributing, in their teaching, their educational practice and their mode of financing, to an economy that is part of the problem.