As I was close to exiting the Catholic Church’s rear door about a decade ago, Pope Francis got my attention and I decided to stick around for a while, in case things got interesting. And sure enough, they did.
While I was disappointed that Francis apparently chose not to sell the Vatican and move the Church’s HQ operations to Haiti as I was hoping, quite a few other good things happened. Like his convening of a global group in 2019 called the Economy of Francesco, a project not exactly welcomed by certain “free market” Catholics.
Inspired by the EoF’s vision of an alternative to extractive neoliberal capitalism, my friends Felipe Witchger and Elizabeth Garlow teamed up to build a U.S.-based organization directed at Catholic asset holders, i.e., people with enormous influence in their church’s investing community.
The new org was called the Francesco Collaborative, a program of “Livable Future Investing” workshops in which participants—from Catholic hospitals, Catholic university endowments, and investment funds of religious orders—are presented with a roadmap, a series of connected dots leading from Pope Francis and the tradition of Catholic social teachings (still not well known to many Catholics) to real-world, operating solidarity economy enterprises in need of capital.
And here’s the beauty of their work. After Felipe and Elizabeth ask workshop participants to reflect over four weeks on how their training has largely led them to investment practices clearly misaligned with Catholic principles like solidarity, subsidiarity and the common good, something remarkable usually happens: millions of dollars get reallocated.
Workshop participants undergo a kind of personal transformation which reconnects them to their deepest Catholic identity—in a renewed sense and a new moment.
Sometimes well along in their careers, these money managers—who often identify as merely nominal Catholics or not at all—find themselves becoming protagonists of the change their pope has been calling for. Some spirit-filled work going on here.
See you next time—peace.
A Chat with Felipe Witchger