The growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a minority—the so-called “mega-rich”—constitutes one of the most significant phenomena in contemporary economics. It is extensively addressed in the encyclical Magnifica humanitas, on the safeguarding of the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, by Pope Leo XIV, published just days ago. These are the new “lords” of the digital economy. They are the new magnates, technological oligarchs and billionaires, who accumulate economic power, data and global influence, to the point of influencing public opinion and controlling algorithms, with a direct impact on human working conditions and labor.
This process occurs in a context marked by the finitude of natural resources and by a global ecological crisis, which calls into question the foundations of the unlimited growth model. From an ecclesial perspective, this reality cannot be interpreted solely through technical or economic categories: it demands a moral and theological reading, in faithfulness to the Social Doctrine of the Church.
Catholic social tradition starts from a fundamental principle: the economy is subordinate to the person and to the common good. Already from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, the Church has insisted that economic systems must respect human dignity and guarantee just conditions for all. This intuition is later developed with the principle of the universal destination of goods: creation has been given by God to all humanity and, therefore, private property—although legitimate—is always encumbered by a “social mortgage.” On a planet of limited resources, this assertion acquires renewed urgency: extreme accumulation is not only a social inequality, but also a matter of distributive and ecological justice.
The phenomenon of the mega-rich reveals a structural tension in the contemporary economic system: the tendency to consider resources as unlimited and human desires as infinite. It is another of the fundamental issues raised by Leo XIV in his encyclical. This logic had already been strongly criticized by Pope Francis in the encyclical Laudato si’, where he denounced the technocratic paradigm that legitimizes the overexploitation of nature and an economy oriented exclusively toward profit. According to this vision, the concentration of wealth is not an accident, but the fruit of a system that prioritizes accumulation above the common good and ignores ecological limits.
In this context, the Social Doctrine of the Church proposes an alternative anthropology. As Saint John Paul II recalled in Laborem Exercens, human work—and therefore the person—has primacy over capital. This assertion subverts the logic that sustains extreme accumulation: capital is not an end in itself, but an instrument in service of human life. When capital is concentrated disproportionately, there is a risk that the person becomes subordinate to the economy, something that the Social Doctrine considers morally unacceptable.
Yours
Joan Planellas
Religión Digital