“Truly, Much Can Be Done”: Cooperative Economics from the Book of Acts to Pope Francis

for Care for the World: Laudato Si’ and Catholic Social Thought in an Era of Climate Crisis, edited by Frank Pasquale (Cambridge University Press, 2019) At several key moments in Laudato Si’, Pope Francis makes passing reference to cooperative economics – when speaking of a more human relationship with technology, for instance, and in relation to sustainable energy production. Reading these in light of his past statements on economic cooperation, it is evident that “cooperative,” for him, is no vague nicety; rather, he is referring to a robust tradition of Catholic economic thought grounded in distributed ownership of the means of production and the precedence of persons over capital. This essay reviews the contours of the tradition that the pope is referring to, beginning with his own past statements on cooperative enterprise. It considers the foundations in biblical narratives of the early church; notions of the commons in early canon law; economic practices in monastic cultures; Catholic leadership in the emergence of modern cooperation; and the current, complex interactions between Catholic thought and the secular resurgence of cooperative economics. In addition to tying together historical threads, it draws from reporting on contemporary cooperative enterprise and on Francis’s pre-papal history with cooperativism in Argentina. Cooperative economics is a central yet under-appreciated backdrop to what the pope attempted to accomplish in Laudato Si’, and a vital component of the hope for “integral ecology” that he envisions.