When reading Pope Leo XIV’s apostolic exhortation “Dilexit Te,” I recalled the recurring phrase of the late Horace McKenna, a Jesuit who worked in southern Maryland, Philadelphia and Washington with the poor, particularly with Black American communities. Father McKenna, who passed away in 1982, would often say in homilies that the church without social ministries would be like the Gospels without the miracles.

The miracles are Christ showing us in practice what he preached in words: that ministry is about responding to the concrete needs of people. As Christ shows us in the miracle accounts in the Gospels, he did not want to bring attention to himself (often he would explicitly tell the recipients of his miracles not to talk about them), but he would encourage the recipients of his miracles to return to the community to show that their wounds had been healed. In his miracles, Christ is giving us, his disciples, a model for our own ministry.

“Dilexi Te” is a strong reminder that the church, in its social ministries, is a redistributive institution. We transfer alms from the well-off and financially secure by concrete works of charity to those most in need, as Christ himself responded to those in need. Of course, unlike Christ, in our works of charity we do not offer miracle cures, but we offer care and comfort in our ministry to those in need, as well as reconciliation, forgiveness and the hope of eternal life to those who wish to receive our spiritual works of mercy.  

In “Dilexit Te,” Pope Leo recounts some of the myriad works of mercy through the ages by members of religious communities. Many in my boomer generation of Catholics are certainly beneficiaries of the generosity of religious sisters who helped to provide us with a very low-cost (if not free) education in parochial schools. As an economist, I would find it a staggering sum if I tried to calculate the present value of their “contributed services” for forming Catholics of my and previous generations. The service of these religious sisters, living their vows of poverty, enriched many. This is something we should never forget, and we should pray in thanksgiving for God’s generosity to us through them. 

Pope Leo does not talk about the creation of wealth, which is essential to any work of charity, in “Dilexi Te.” He could have noted the contributions of the Salamanca school of Spain, not an institution per se but an intellectual movement involving Dominicans and Jesuits in the 16th and 17th centuries. In a rare instance when Jesuits and Dominicans were not debating fine points of moral theology, this movement paved the way for the transition to modern capitalism and finance. 

It did so in two ways. As Thomas Sargent and François Velde wrote in The Big Problem of Small Change, as markets expanded in feudal times, societies confronted the problem of means of exchange. One could hardly break a gold or silver coin to purchase bananas in a village market. But at the same time, barter would not lead to the expansion of commerce. So, should the king be allowed to issue debased copper coinage? At the time, this was considered a violation of the natural law. Money is supposed to have “intrinsic value,” and it should not be something that could be expanded in any arbitrary fashion by the king. But the Salamanca school effectively argued the principle of externality, or double effect, where an action can have unintended positive or negative consequences beyond the intent of the original actor. In this case, it argued that the benefits of allowing debased coinage would outweigh this violation of the natural law of “intrinsic value” of coinage.

More importantly, the Salamanca school also argued for Christians to be allowed to charge interest, which had been prohibited until then because it had been considered usury. It argued that the scriptural basis for prohibiting interest was based on almsgiving—that is, that lending money to a brother or sister in need should not be an occasion to extract interest payments. However, when lending became a form of finance and sharing in the risk of new commerce, the school argued, the traditional prohibition no longer applied. In other words, to receive interest payments is a reward for sharing risk; it is not extracting payments from a brother or sister in need.

In this way, the Salamanca school paved the way for the transition to modern finance and capitalism. Of course, both the use of debased coinage and the use of market interest rates have been abused through monetary expansion in many instances, causing hyperinflation and predatory lending. But without the use of  “debased coinage” and market interest rates, it is hard to see how the economic growth of the past few centuries would have come about.

My basic point is that for the church to serve as an effective redistributive institution, responsible wealth creation is a necessary condition. While the “invisible hand” or the principle of self-interest are often scapegoats when we think of the real-world economy, we should remember that the author of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, who invented this term, was also the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and a clergyman. For him, “self-interest” was a self-interest guided by the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes and the Last Judgment, where empathy certainly has its place. The invisible hand becomes a destructive force when these presuppositions are forgotten. 

The implication of my reading of “Dilexi Te” is that a key mission of the church, in addition to its redistributive activities, is to continue to form responsible men and women for the world of commerce and finance as well as wider professions serving society, such as law, health care, education and public service, who are guided by the Gospels and thus will continue to support the redistributive work of the church in their vocations and almsgiving.

Paul D. McNelis, S.J., is America’s contributing editor for economics and a visiting professor of economics at Boston College.