Pope Francis still advocates for Degrowth

There is a somewhat tired saying, which holds that “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”. The claim is probably not true, but growth-sceptics may well wish it was. By now, the word degrowth has made its way from an indecipherable slogan on the fringes of academic and activist society, to a place perhaps not at the centre of political debate, but at least its proximate suburbs. Increasingly, degrowth is thus a proposal which growth-loyalists need to fight.

As a recent diatribe in the Washington Post demonstrates, however, degrowth has not quite yet reached the point where its detractors need to have even the faintest comprehension of the object of their ire. The usual misconceptions are on ample display: “Degrowth”, the reader learns, is the new “brand name for neo-Malthusianism”, which “ignore basic lessons of history”. “Growth”, furthermore, “built a world in which one person’s gain needn’t require another’s loss”, and “[c]onsensual politics and democracy wouldn’t have been possible without it”. To challenge growth is the quixotic ambition of desolate countries and fringe figures, such as North Korea on the one hand, and Pope Francis on the other.

Despite everything wrong about the Washington Post editorial, one thing is heartening to behold: The seemingly unquestioned identification of Pope Francis with the degrowth crowd. For those who recall, Francis’ path-breaking encyclical on the environment was greeted with awe and enthusiasm from much of the environmental movement, yet not without a certain perplexion in respect to key terms. Did Francis claim, as in the English version, that “the time has come to accept decreased growth in some parts of the world” – or was he really calling for the more specific “decrecimiento”, “decrescita” or “décroissance” of the Spanish, Italian and French renderings of this same sentence? Some would insist – also on this very blog – that the encyclical was indeed an insistence on the need for degrowth. Now, almost ten years later, it appears that these claims have exercised their due effect.

There is very little, of course, to suggest that the Washington Post writers have a hold on Catholic doctrine which is any better than their grasp of degrowth. Thus, perhaps it is better to ask for ourselves: Is Pope Francis – the head of one of the worlds’ most numerous and most vertically integrated community of believers – really a proponent of degrowth? The contention that this is the case was first made on the basis of an encyclical, meaning a letter on ethics or doctrine which the pope issues for circulation. Now, as recently as 2023, the incumbent pope issued another letter on the ecological crisis: The apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum. While such exhortations are less binding for the faithful than the postulations of an encyclical, the document nonetheless provides an opportunity to probe Francis’ position.

The exhortation, which was written in anticipation of COP28 in Dubai, begins by picking up the thread from Laudato Si’. “I have realized that our responses have not been adequate”, the pope laments. It is “no longer possible to doubt the human – ‘anthropic’ – origin of climate change”, seen in the escalation of extreme weather phenomena, rising sea levels and melting ice caps, droughts and floods, and a possible crashing point of no return looming in the near future. “[T]he world in which we live is collapsing”, Francis writes, and indeed “the other creatures of this world have stopped being our companions along the way and have become instead our victims”.

The ones who are concerned about climate change, however, are now legion, and many are those who call for decisive action. None of the above amounts to an intervention on behalf of degrowth specifically, and this letter indeed does not use the term. But it takes only a brief look at the document as a whole to see how Francis does the inverse of aforementioned critics of degrowth: Where the opponents name their target and critique it in a manner which entirely misses the point, the pope eschews the word yet clearly speaks its language. 

Rather than “growth”, the key term Francis deploys in Laudate Deum – carrying over from Laudato si’ – is “technocratic paradigm”. The logic of this analysis is found already with the title of the document: “praise God”. I believe that this should be understood in relation to a widespread Catholic notion that humans (akin to God) are free creators of worlds. This world-making creativity is a source of joy; hence environmentalism of the kind that would withdraw humans from pristine wilderness takes little space in the publication.

Rather than human intervention in nature, the danger is instead found where humans begin to value their creative power self-referentially. When such a re-shuffling of values has taken place, the expansion of this power as such– by technological, economic, scientific, or other means – becomes the only good to be pursued. The standard of progress comes to amount to nothing but a celebration of human will and design, oriented towards levelling any obstacles to its assertion.

It is thus, Francis seems to believe, that we begin to imagine that “reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such”. Here, there is no longer any basis on which to assert limits or self-restraint, and –  as creators unmoored from their place in creation – some will “accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology”.

Is Pope Francis an advocate for degrowth? Absolutely, in the sense that he develops a social critique which dovetails with the concerns of degrowth enthusiasts. These parallels with the more overtly confessional degrowth movement are underscored by the concrete standpoints he develops. The recourse to techno-fixes, for instance, is lambasted as a form of “homicidal pragmatism”, and the Pope’s concern with environmental justice is evident in his insistence “that Africa, home to more than half of the world’s poorest people, is responsible for a minimal portion of historic emissions”.

Some will fault the pontiff for his emphasis on an unsound “mentality” rather than on social structures, and for his reluctance towards political naming – as when not deploying Capital when speaking of “[t]he mentality of maximum gain at minimal cost”, or patriarchy as a key obstacle for the caring comportment he repeatedly celebrates. Yet similar critiques are routinely levelled against the degrowth movement generally, both in respects to its idealism and its reluctance to align its analysis with one ready-made political position (say, Marxism). In both respects, such presumptive shortcomings in Francis’ letter only serves to underscore the similitude with degrowth.

This is not to say that there is any unproblematic affinity between the Catholic Church and the degrowth movement. Not only is this the case with recent converts – such as aspiring vice president  J. D. Vance – who conspire to make at least U.S. Catholicism a bastion for militant fossil-chauvinism. Historically, the Catholic relation to radical social movements has often been anything but benign: “no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist”, holds a papal encyclical issued in 1931, enunciating a position by which the church would prop up “market-friendly” politics across the world.

More recently, church positions (such as the insistence on a given irreducibility of sexual difference) often puts it in tension with the progressive milieus in which the degrowth movement is enmeshed. Nonetheless, despite its intertwinement with the powers of this world, the heart of the Church remains a gospel for the destitute rabble of society. The heritage of the Catholic church is a bewildering tangle of roots and shoots, of which many are among the most radical the historical record holds. For the benefit for both the church and for degrowth, Francis reminds us of where each is entangled with the other. This is so for the alleged connection between a growth-mentality and a specifically protestant “work ethic”, which is sometimes invoked to explain how degrowth first took hold in Latin Europe.

It is also so in the case of more concrete persons, such as the Jesuit priest Ivan Illich, whose Catholic reflections on technology, development and conviviality provides the enduring wellspring for degrowth on such issues. Or E.F. Schumacher, whose Small is Beautiful is a scarcely concealed reworking of Catholic social teaching, and who would joke about his famous notion “Buddhist economics” that he “might have called it Christian economics, but then no one would have read it”. Such anti-modernist – even reactionary – sides to degrowth have become increasingly impalpable; yet if the movement is to remain distinct from generic green-flavoured progressivism, this is a heritage to re-work and cherish.

In the case of Francis and his recent exhortation, what is less clear is whether it will have an impact on the course of present-day politics sufficient to usher what he calls “a new process marked by three requirements: that it be drastic, intense and count on the commitment of all”. Yet while apostolic exhortations are not definitely legislative for the Catholic church, its faithful are expected to pay attention and to listen.

One hopes that this will contribute to fewer misapprehensions of the kind recently found in the Washington Post. For those disposed neither towards such misconceptions nor towards Catholic thought, the letter nonetheless presents an opportunity to consider ways in which to shift our response to looming climate catastrophe from reaction towards action, based on a new and decisive engagement with “the question of meaning”.

As Pope Francis implores those concerned with the ecological crisis to ask themselves: “’What is the meaning of my life? What is the meaning of my time on this earth? And what is the ultimate meaning of all my work and effort?’”.