Global Mammon, Human Rights, and Popular Social Catholicism after Pope Francis

With Hispanic peoples in the Americas as the populous source of the Catholic Church worldwide, modern social Catholicism must have a new optic to address intersecting crises afflicting Western democratic societies. My research project takes up Pope Francis’s call for the global Church to accompany social movements inspired by popular piety and organized around the rights of labor, housing, and land. Marshaling a social Catholicism from the global South to engage the global North, the first Hispanic pope, steeped in a teología del pueblo (“theology of the people”), identifies the international imperialism of money as the greatest social and ecological challenge to justice and the integral development of peoples. This project takes me to Buenos Aires for short-term participant observation of key popular movements and the interviewing of social leaders and theologians with the following question guiding my inquiry: How does Pope Francis’s Argentine cultural and theological background contribute to his social teachings on democratic politics, economic globalization, and care for our common home?