Anima economica/10 - How Catholic Social Teaching Takes Shape and the Renewed Vision of Solidarity Toward All Humanity
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on March 15, 2026
There are moments in history, in both small and large communities, when one suddenly finds oneself at the crest of a ridge, and there one must immediately decide which of the two slopes to continue down. It is the choice between being the last of a world that is ending or the first of another that is about to begin. The first is low-risk and peaceful; the second is high-risk but holds the promise of a future. Placed by history upon one of these ridges of the Church, the Second Vatican Council found itself on the side of the new: a positive direction resulting from a collective choice, but above all, it was a resurrection.
Today concludes this ten-part series on the history of the Church’s Social Doctrine. It has been a difficult series to write, and perhaps to read; especially its early installments, when we traced the genesis of *Rerum Novarum*, of *Quadragesimo Anno*, and then the convergences between the “third way” advocated by the Catholic Church and that realized by fascist corporatism. I also thank those colleagues who wrote articles—some published in this very newspaper—to politely critique my arguments. The primary purpose of those who do my work is to ask questions, spark debates, and set processes in motion, hoping that the questions are good and the processes generative. Finally, we have arrived at Pope John and the Second Vatican Council. That assembly of bishops, cardinals, and priests—with very few laypeople and very few women observers—was able to allow the strong breath of the Spirit to blow unhindered. It was a powerful, long, and authentic ‘conversation in the Spirit,’ without professional facilitators and without the techniques of consultants. To remind us, forever, that the Church, and all its communities, certainly have dynamics that resemble those of companies and all institutions, but within them there is a small measure of diversity, as small as a mustard seed, which nevertheless makes the sociology of Christian communities something specific and unique; and when we forget this, everything becomes flat and trivialized, and all prophecy disappears. Those men, many of whom embodied visions of the Church and society from the old regime, found themselves at the center of an authentic epiphany of the Spirit—among the greatest in the history of the Church—which enabled them to listen to the Spirit and the prophets of their time. They could not resist the good storm of the Holy Spirit that raged in the Vatican during certain sessions and moments of that long council of two Popes. Everyone, progressives and conservatives alike, was swept up in it, and something very similar to what the prophet Ezekiel experienced in the valley of dry bones took place: those Catholic bones, dried up by centuries of the Counter-Reformation and the struggle against modernity, came to life once more: “Thus says the Lord God: O Spirit, come from the four winds and breathe upon these dead, that they may live.” The Lord says: “Behold, I will open your graves and bring you up from your tombs, O my people” (Ezek. 37:5–12). We cannot understand the Council without taking this ‘collective resurrection’ that took place within the Vatican walls very seriously, when another stone rolled away—it might not have been there, perhaps it should not have been there: but it was, and those fathers were greater than their ecclesiologies and theologies. And we must not forget that resurrection today, while in the absence of prophets or of those who recognize and listen to them, we delude ourselves that business methodologies and techniques will fill the great void of prophecy.
A key figure in that conciliar turning point, today not sufficiently remembered or valued, is Father Louis-Joseph Lebret (1897–1966), a French Dominican. His background, spanning theology and economics, his extensive experience and knowledge of Latin America and many “developing” peoples, his sensitivity, and his personal charisma were essential to Gaudium et Spes (1965) and later to Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967). He was not an academic; on the contrary, he had an aversion to the world of abstract analysis. In 1941, he founded the association “Economie et Humanisme,” a journal and a true international research center that generated ideas, field studies, and inductive analyses, graphs and data, and above all new categories and new narratives on poverty and the development of peoples: “Economie et Humanisme is a commitment in the face of the world’s misery, a political act of mercy, understanding mercy in its evangelical and etymological sense. In the word mercy, there is the heart and misery: the condition of the heart anguished by misery, the tension of the will to restore justice in the face of undeserved miseries” (Economie et Humanisme, 1944).
Lebret arrived late among the Council’s “experts” (March 1964), and his participation in the work “was not a foregone conclusion” (M. Dau, L.J. Lebret, 2025, p. 281). A participation that was nonetheless decisive, especially for the social, economic, and political sections of *Gaudium et Spes*, and in general for the *metanoia* that the Church underwent in relation to the world. In his Diary, Lebret described his work at the Council as follows: “Serious work is done in small meetings through which one opens oneself to the reality of the world, so far removed, unfortunately, from many bishops” (October 21, 1964). In a note on the “signs of the times” from October 1964, he wrote: “The world expects Christians, filled with intelligent charity and marked by fidelity to the Gospel, to be effective pioneers of universal development, hand in hand with people of good will.” (In Dau, p. 284).
The first draft of Schema XIII received much criticism in the plenary session. Lebret began working on the approximately 20,000 contributions and motions from the fathers in Ariccia, with 29 council fathers, 38 experts, and about twenty laypeople: “What a joy to encounter the living Church in search of communion with humanity,” he wrote in his diary on February 4, 1965. From June to July 1965, while in the hospital, he commented on the draft of the document from there and expressed regret over insufficient attention “to what is valid in modern and contemporary thought—often non-Christian—with which many people today are steeped. Not enough account is taken of the various currents of thought… The same applies to socialism, existentialism, philosophies of values, and the anti-rationalist reactions of the Arab world and Africanism… Thus some Christians will be disappointed, whereas the first phase of the Introduction could have given them hope” (in Dau, p. 286). Lebret saw and soared farther than the “flight” of the Council, which to many already seemed too “foolish.” On December 6, 1965, Schema XIII was approved by an overwhelming majority, under the auspicious title Gaudium et Spes.
Cardinal Poupard wrote in 1986: “For Pope Paul VI, Father Lebret was a man who came from the future to help his contemporaries bid farewell to outdated visions that could not enter the future by looking back.” A complete reversal of perspective: at last, people stopped searching for the promised land by looking back; they began to hope to glimpse it on the horizon of tomorrow. Furthermore, Lebret was strongly convinced that “charity” was not enough because “we had to work to change the structures” (in Dau, p. 288). The pre-conciliar idea of social justice led to managing poverty through the charity (or rather alms) of the rich, who remained just that after giving charity: the time had come to call for a change in the world’s economic and social structures, and thus to question the root causes of inequality.
Lebret wrote beautiful, prophetic passages. One of his most moving dates from 1943, in the midst of World War II: “All these men together—I begin to look at them. I look at them one after another, individually and in groups; in the end, I like them.” We are in the midst of a description akin to that of a great awakening: after centuries of anthropological slumber, in Lebret and other prophets the Church awakens, opens its eyes, and finally sees the man of its time, in all his beauty: “There is much greatness in man, much beauty; we feel that he is not a creature like other creatures. His stature, his bearing are different. People’s gestures are beautiful to watch, and their skill is a pleasure to observe. But what pleases, what attracts most about them—even in those who seem to me the most degraded, the most dominated—is a gaze that suddenly reveals to you the secret of an existence. Sometimes it is merely a look of cruelty and wickedness, but it is very rare that in certain moments one does not find great clarity, great passion, a great ideal. All of this, in an instant, you have understood, and you have been deeply moved by it.” (The Discovery of the Concrete Human Being). The whole Church was moved by this new perspective, and we continue to be moved by it—we must be.
I wish to conclude this article and this series once again with the “Preface” of *Gaudium et Spes*, to whose final drafting the great moral theologian Bernhard Häring contributed. It is one of the most beautiful and lofty texts in the modern history of the Church, pointing to a luminous horizon that still lies entirely before us, and which continues to call us: “The joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ as well; indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to find an echo in their hearts. Therefore, the Christian community feels a real and intimate solidarity with the human race and its history.” The Church’s kiss of love for humanity.
All that remains is for me to offer a heartfelt and sincere thank you to Marco Girardo, for his trust and courage in publishing these difficult articles. A thank you that I extend to Francesco Ognibene, Massimo Calvi, and the entire editorial staff of Avvenire, a community-oriented newspaper that has now become part of my research and my work. Finally, thank you to you, dear readers, a company that has also become a source of consolation.
