Consider, for example, the distance between our need to protect and regenerate Mother Earth and an economic model that regards growth at any cost as its prime objective.

Of course, some regions — very underdeveloped areas, or countries recovering from war — need their economies to grow rapidly to meet their people’s basic needs. But in the wealthier parts of the world, the fixation with constant economic growth has become destabilizing, producing vast inequalities and putting the natural world out of balance. Unlimited expansion of productivity and consumption assumes human dominance over creation, but the environmental disaster it has brought about has shattered the assumptions of that thinking. We are part of creation; we do not own it: to some extent, it owns us; we cannot live apart from it. This crisis or breach is a sign of our time.

The disruption of Covid has turned the tables, inviting us to stop, alter our routines and priorities, and to ask: What if the economic, the social, and the ecological challenges we face are really different faces of the same crisis? What if they have a common solution? Could it be that replacing the objective of growth with that of new ways of relating will allow for a different kind of economy, one that meets the needs of all within the means of our planet?

Pope Francis, Let Us Dream, p. 60