When Everything’s for Sale: Catholic Faith Against a Distorted Economy ~ Pope Leo XIV

When Everything’s for Sale: Catholic Faith Against a Distorted Economy ~ Pope Leo XIV

“Around us, a distorted economy tries to profit from everything.”

That line hit me hard when I first read it. I had flashbacks to what is happening in the US economy. It names something we all feel but struggle to articulate—a spiritual crisis where everything becomes something to buy or sell. People stop being gifts and become products. Creation becomes inventory. And the logic of profit drowns out the logic of grace.

Catholic Social Teaching, rooted in the Gospel, gives us tools to understand what makes an economy “distorted” and how we can respond. Let me walk you through this using the See–Judge–Act method.

See: Naming the Distorted Economy

A “distorted economy” isn’t just one with technical glitches or inefficiencies. It’s an economic order whose basic rules and cultural instincts no longer serve real human beings or the common good. Instead, it treats:

• People as labor units, content generators, data points, or “human capital.”
• Relationships as networking opportunities
• Creation as raw material to exploit
• Even our spiritual hunger as a market to capture

Catholic Social Teaching calls this a “distorted vision of man and economic activity.” People get reduced to their roles as producers and consumers. What should be economic freedom ends up alienating and oppressing us instead of serving genuine human flourishing.

Judge: What the Gospel Says

Remember when Jesus drove the merchants from the Temple? When he says, “You cannot serve God and mammon”? He’s confronting the temptation to turn what is holy—and whois holy—into an opportunity for profit.

An economy becomes “distorted” in Gospel terms when money, efficiency, and growth become functional gods that demand sacrifice.

Catholic Social Teaching helps us understand this through several key principles:

Human dignity: Every person is created in God’s image and can never be treated merely as a tool for profit or a disposable cost.

Common good and solidarity: When an economy produces deep exclusion and inequality as expected outcomes—where whole groups are “without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape”—that’s not just imperfect. It’s morally disordered.

Moral truth and transcendence: A system that claims to be “value-neutral” and treats markets as self-justifying is rejecting a fundamental truth: economic life must answer to God’s law and to the real needs of the poor.

Think about how Jesus lived a completely different “economy.” He healed without charge. He multiplied bread for the hungry. He restored those that society had cast aside. He proclaimed a kingdom where the poor are blessed, and the last are first. Grace is given, not sold. Inclusion is offered, not monetized.

What Makes an Economy “Distorted”

Modern social encyclicals—from Rerum Novarum to recent teaching—don’t give us a simple dictionary definition. But they consistently describe certain features of a distorted economy:

It absolutizes profit and growth, treating them as final measures of value and success rather than means within a moral framework ordered to human flourishing.

It excludes and discards: poverty, unemployment, and growing inequality are built into its structures. People with low incomes and migrants become collateral damage rather than neighbors.

It claims moral neutrality, pretending the market is just a technical mechanism. At the same time, in practice, it privileges the strong and leaves the vulnerable unprotected.

It commodifies gifts and relationships, turning education, health, culture, and even the environment into mere opportunities for financial gain rather than shared goods entrusted to all.

Catholic Social Teaching calls this a loss of an “integral vision of the human person and of society.” Any economy that forgets the person’s transcendent dignity, the priority of people with low incomes, and care for creation is fundamentally out of order.

Act: Personal Conversion in an Age of Monetization

If the distortion runs through systems and culture, it also runs through our own hearts and habits. The first place to respond is in personal conversion. Here are some concrete steps:

Examine your consumption: Don’t just ask “Can I afford this?” Ask “Who is bearing the hidden cost?” and “Does this purchase support or damage the common good, workers, and creation?”

Practice Sabbath from the market: Set times when buying, selling, and constant scrolling stop. Let relationships, prayer, and rest be received as gifts rather than treated as wasted “productive time.”

Support work and production: When possible, choose employers and businesses that pay fair wages, respect labor, and reduce environmental harm—even when that means paying more or consuming less.

Cultivate generosity: Tithing, almsgiving, mutual aid, sharing time and skills—these break the fear that we are only what we can earn and own. They witness to an economy of grace.

These aren’t merely lifestyle tweaks. They’re small acts of resistance against the “everything-for-sale” mentality that Pope Leo XIV criticizes and that Catholic Social Teaching judges as spiritually dangerous.

Act: Community and Structural Conversion

Because sin is both personal and structural, the See–Judge–Act method pushes us beyond individual action to community and public life.

Communities and institutions can:

Form consciences: Parishes, schools, and ministries can integrate Catholic Social Teaching into preaching, catechesis, and adult formation—explicitly connecting the Gospel to issues such as labor, housing, technology, debt, and ecology.

Witness in their own practices: Pay just wages in church institutions. Offer transparent and ethical financial practices. Orient budgets toward people with low incomes and the excluded. Show that another logic is possible.

Build alternative economic spaces: Support cooperatives, credit unions, parish hardship funds, local farms, worker centers, and migrant communities. Embody forms of economic life that prioritize people over profit.

Advocate for just structures: Work for policies that protect workers, restrain predatory finance, provide fair access to housing and healthcare, and safeguard creation. Laws and institutions powerfully shape what we consider “normal” in economic life.

Catholic Social Teaching insists that an economy is truly healthy when it promotes integral human development—when every person and the whole person can grow in dignity, relationship, and holiness. A distorted economy, in contrast, makes this growth harder by enthroning profit and sacrificing people and the planet.

Living an Economy of Grace

At the center of Christian life is a God who gives himself away freely. The Cross and Resurrection reveal an “economy of grace” where life is received, not bought, and shared, not hoarded.

To take Pope Leo XIV’s warning seriously is to let this divine generosity reshape how we work, consume, vote, organize, and worship. Our lives can quietly but steadily proclaim: not everything is for sale—because we, and all creation, already belong to God.