With Pope Francis touring America, I started thinking about his positions on economics. His Holiness gave a speech only two months into his pontificate where he said “We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.”

If you’ll indulge me in a little Sunday School, the “golden calf” he is mentioning refers to the story of Moses’ brother Aaron and the Israelites while Moses was away for forty days and nights on Mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments from God. The Israelites worried that Moses had abandoned them, and demanded that Aaron make gods for them to worship. So Aaron melted all of the golden earrings into a calf statue so the Israelites could worship it. But God heard about this and sent Moses back down to see what was going on. Enraged at what he saw, he threw the stone tablets to the ground, smashing them. He then burned the calf. The story is often interpreted as how humans can create false gods out of anything in times of crisis.

So Pope Francis claims that we as a society are worshipping money above anything. Personally speaking, he’s not that far off. How often do we hear about how the Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ Composite and S&P 500 are going? And how many non-business-related majors know what that means? We acknowledge that higher values are good for the economy, and that massive plunges are signs of economic collapse, but beyond that, what does the average person know about how and why these indices work? If high values are good, how come we don’t feel these effects here? But we know that they’re good. All the business pundits in nice suits say so.

Income inequality is a fact of most economies. Classic bartering revolves around an inequality. To use Settlers of Catan resources as an example, I have sheep, but someone has wheat. Both of us need the other’s resource, and we arrange a trade. What becomes a problem is when I have so much of everything I can’t possibly use or trade it all. The inverse is also undesirable: I don’t have anything I can trade or use, so I can’t form the settlements, roads, and cities I need to win the game.

What works, in both Catan and real life, is a sweet spot of sufficiency and need. But the Pope would claim that this pure numbers game is not at all worth it. It neglects the very real human element.

Under the current system, we have incredible prosperity, but also a tremendous gap between the richest of rich and just the middle class, to say nothing of the poorest of the poor. And unfortunately, the wealth that we’ve been told will come to us in time simply hasn’t over thirty years. If anything, the wealth has disappeared entirely. That creates poverty, which creates crime, drug use and many other social ills. This Pope recognizes this, having worked with the poor of Buenos Aires for years before becoming the city’s archbishop. His message of wealth redistribution appeals to a lot of people because we’re being shorted.

We’ve been shorted for decades, suckered in by televangelists of cash, claiming that these tax breaks are seeds that will sprout into massive growth for all. The seeds of global dissent, not broad growth, have instead sprouted. Perhaps this Pope will be the gardener that the world needs.