The Concept of the Common Good in Pope Francis’s Teaching and Its Implications for Economic Thought: A Meaning Clusters Approach

This article examines Pope Francis’s concept of the common good and its implications for economic thought, addressing the need for a richer evaluative framework than those centred on public goods or efficiency-based welfare. It identifies five recurrent meaning clusters in Francis’s use of the term: governance criterion and institutional obligation; peacebuilding, dialogue, and civic reconciliation; social justice, inclusion, and protection of the vulnerable; integral ecology and intergenerational responsibility; and the moral–epistemic conditions of social cooperation. The analysis is based on a mixed-methods design applied to all official, publicly available papal sources in which the term common good appears explicitly, combining quantitative mapping of occurrences with qualitative interpretation of their semantic contexts across documents and public statements. The findings indicate that, in Francis’s teaching, the common good functions as a normative-institutional meta-criterion for evaluating whether economic and political arrangements support dignified human development, inclusion, and ecological viability across time horizons. In dialogue with welfare economics, public economics, social choice theory, and selected common-good-oriented approaches, the article argues that this framework offers a broader evaluative vocabulary for economic analysis, integrating justice, ecological limits, institutional structure, and moral formation.