Pope Leo XIV urges youth at Economy of Francesco to reject an economy reduced to a “production machine” and build systems that restore dignity and hope.
Newsroom (28/11/2025 Gaudium Press ) In a message to hundreds of young economists and entrepreneurs gathered just outside Rome, Pope Leo XIV challenged them to break down the “wall” of indifference and radically reorient an economic order that, he warned, has been reduced to a mere “production machine” that generates inequality and discards the vulnerable.
The papal message, dated 26 November and addressed to participants in the global “The Economy of Francesco” event running from 28–30 November at the Mariapoli Centre, places itself in direct continuity with the vision of his predecessor, Pope Francis.
“No one is more in touch than you young people with the ‘new things’ on which humanity’s future depends,” the Pope wrote, describing the Economy of Francesco process as a fertile path that “fertilizes economic thought and initiative,” capable of “making even the desert bloom.”
Echoing language once used by Francis, Leo XIV recalled his predecessor’s death “in the fragrance of Easter” and presented Francis’s legacy as an ongoing “calling” for the rising generation. He quoted directly from a 2022 address of Francis to the same movement: “May a new way of living together and doing economics be born among you—one that produces no waste but material and spiritual well-being.”
Taking up this inheritance as his own, the Pope added Francis’s earlier exhortation: “Have courage, dear friends! Courage! If you remain faithful to your vocation, your life will flourish, and you will have wonderful stories to tell your children and grandchildren.”
This year’s gathering is organized around the theme “Restarting the Economy.” Pope Leo seized on the phrase to issue a sweeping indictment of prevailing models. “Restarting,” he wrote, “means bringing back systems of life that are more than a mere ‘production machine’, restoring vitality to people, communities, and our common home.” To restart authentically, he continued, requires “breaking the chains of injustice, repairing what has been wounded, and creating spaces in which every man and woman can breathe dignity and hope.”
The Pope explicitly encouraged participants to expose, through their research, enterprises, and lived witness, “the incapacity of a system” that widens inequality and abandons the small and vulnerable. “Together,” he insisted, “we can welcome God’s dreams and see how they broaden our own, drawing us into a people’s adventure in which walls and prejudices fall and peace finds room to grow.”
In a closing pastoral note, Leo XIV stressed that serious economic engagement must be accompanied by social action and cannot be reduced to fleeting trends. He urged the young attendees to “return to the heart” through daily encounter with Scripture, which he called “the landscape in which God still makes his voice heard and inspires our visions.”
“You will be good entrepreneurs and good economists,” the Pope concluded, “if you come to know the divine economy: this is the secret of the many witnesses who have gone before us and who still walk with us. Dear young people, go forward. Indeed, let us go forward together!”
- Raju Hasmukh with files from Vatican News
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