Lebret and Vatican II in the Global Church

published in Agorà by Avvenire on 04/08/2026

The Second Vatican Council represents a beacon of light in the history of the modern Church, a light that has not yet gone out, even though it is gradually receding from our horizon. The world has changed greatly over these sixty years, and the Church along with it; social and ethical priorities have shifted (think of the environment), and the spiritual language and narrative codes of the individual and collective soul have changed. In this great global flux, we find it increasingly difficult to understand what happened in the Catholic Church between John XXIII and Paul VI, partly because, having lost the habit of reading and studying history, we have forgotten the dire condition from which the Church emerged—and thus the extraordinary and astonishing significance of the Council. An event prepared by the actions and thoughts of many, in a prophetic season that remains unsurpassed in the modern era: “We live in a new world. The Christian, who lives in this new world, cannot turn a blind eye to it and abandon it to its fate” (B. Häring, Christian Witness in a New World, 1960).

A leading figure in this prophetic phase was Father Louis-Joseph Lebret (1897–1966), a French Dominican. His education, spanning theology and economics, his frequent visits to and deep knowledge of Latin America and many “developing” peoples, his sensitivity, and his personal charisma were crucial to the anthropological shift of Vatican II, particularly in Gaudium et Spes (1965) and later in Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967). His Christian vocation, which he pursued alongside his maritime career—“I could never have done the work that was mine had I not first been a naval officer” (Fr. Lebret, Economics at the Service of Man, Città Nuova, 1968)—is marked by three main stages: the Saint-Malo Movement (1930–1939), the Economie et Humanisme movement (1941), and finally the IRFED (International Institute for Research on Harmonized Development, 1958). Three interconnected phases that mark the harmonious growth of a spiritual and social vocation, supported by two pillars: mercy and the observation of reality. The starting point of his action research was, in fact, a deep-seated compassion for humanity’s suffering and injustices; his method was empirical and thus historical, given the importance he placed on real data—a preventive remedy against all ideologies.

A figure now almost forgotten, even by the Catholic Church, which struggles greatly to preserve the memory of its prophets. For this reason as well, we cannot help but welcome with intellectual enthusiasm and joy the book by Michele Dau—Louis Joseph Lebret. Human Economy: Social Progress as Ascent, Castelvecchi, 2025. Lebret was not an academic; on the contrary, he had a natural aversion to the world of abstract analysis, whether theological or philosophical, even though he was a professor of theology. After his experience in Saint-Malo, he founded the association “Economie et Humanisme,” which published a journal of the same name and became a reference point for development studies, offering new ideas on poverty, field surveys, and data, and providing new categories and narratives on poverty and development. He was a forerunner and prophet of lines of thought that fueled the cultural debate within the Church and society in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Among these were the theory of degrowth, the vision of Christianity as the liberation of peoples, A. Sen’s theory of development as freedom, and the concept of integral human development—the “whole person”—an expression he borrowed from Perroux. Development, therefore, understood as a “problem of civilization,” where “affective, intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual values” are central—one of the first insights into what we now call spiritual capital.

His idea of the common good is very important, one of the pillars of the Church’s tradition, which was particularly dear to him, a Dominican and thus a Thomist. For Lebret, the common good was not an abstract and often vague philosophical concept (as one continues to read in many texts). It was not the sum of individual goods (economic utilitarianism), nor was it what economics calls the ‘common good’ or common goods (commons). It was something else, referring to the “community of destiny”: Lebret felt the need for a level of political and social action that looked directly and intentionally toward the good of all, in those matters that truly concerned everyone. He therefore had a vision of society that was not conflictual but harmonious, not because he denied class conflict or the imperialism of rich countries (he knew Marx well and appreciated certain aspects of his thought). Rather, he wanted to emphasize that there are certain dimensions of shared human life where we are truly all in the same boat, where we genuinely and truly become a community of destiny—with COVID, with the environment, and now with the danger of world wars, we realize how timely and essential it is that this idea of the common good be taken into account at all levels.

Lebret was one of the Council’s “experts,” but in reality he was one of its spiritual “fathers.” He joined only in March 1964, because he was not universally esteemed—generally, those with prophetic visions are divisive; only false prophets are liked by everyone. His participation, however, proved decisive, given the role Lebret played in the final drafting of Gaudium et Spes, and thus for the metanoia the Church underwent in relation to the world. When Schema XIII (the text that would ultimately be approved under the beautiful title Gaudium et Spes) was presented to the Council’s plenary session, there were some twenty thousand notes, criticisms, and motions. Lebret was tasked with working in Ariccia, alongside 29 other council fathers, 38 experts, and some twenty laypeople, on the vast amount of material that had emerged from the plenary session. He commented on that work as follows: “What a joy to encounter the living Church in search of communion with humanity,” he wrote in his diary on February 4, 1965. From June to July 1965, while he was in the hospital for the illness that would soon lead to his death, he never stopped working. Despite the revolutionary scope of *Gaudium et Spes*, the Church’s most prophetic social document of the modern era, Lebret believed even more could have been done in opening up to the world: “With regard to what is valid in modern and contemporary thought—often non-Christian—which many people today are steeped in, insufficient account is taken of the various lines of inquiry.” Prophets are constant inhabitants of the land of the “not yet,” and thus always dissatisfied with the “already.” Cardinal Poupard would write in 1986: “For Pope Paul VI, Father Lebret was a man who came from the future to help his contemporaries bid farewell to outdated visions that could not enter the future by looking back.” Finally, the search for the promised land in the memory of yesterday’s world came to an end. Lebret was strongly convinced that “charity” was not enough because “we had to work to change the structures.”

The pre-conciliar Church’s concept of social justice, in fact, led to viewing poverty without seriously questioning the economic and social structures of the world that systematically generated that poverty, partly because the ecclesiastical hierarchies (kings, princes, and counts) were on the wrong side of those structures. For Lebret, and thus for the Council, the time had come to question the root causes of inequality—a time we are still waiting for: “Watchman, how much of the night remains?”

Lebret was a man of action; he did not define himself as an intellectual. Yet he wrote, with a pen of the soul trained by friendship and love for the poor, some beautiful pages. Like this one from 1942, where, in describing the “true scholars,” without knowing or intending to, he was speaking to us of his own vocation: “Their narrow field of research does not constitute a limit for them. It places them in communion with the universe, inasmuch as they have the desire to serve man and humanity. Every day brings them new light. Men of science, they seek contact with men of action and, in turn, work in a laboratory that is reality itself, so as not to waste their lives on solving false problems or chimerical abstractions. Those who can be both men of action and men of science will become the wise ones that these turbulent times need.” How much our even more turbulent times would need these men and women of action and science.