Catholic Religious Traditions as Heuristic Resources for Energy Transition: Integrating Material Flow, Desire Formation, and Sustainability Governance

This conceptual and interpretive article asks how historically distinct Catholic religious traditions can illuminate socio-spiritual dimensions of contemporary energy transition and how those insights can be synthesized without treating the traditions as a single movement or as direct policy blueprints. Using comparative historical–theological analysis of selected foundational texts, institutional documents, and historical scholarship, the study examines Benedictine and Cistercian approaches to material organization, Franciscan accounts of poverty and sufficiency, and Dominican and Jesuit resources for normative and adaptive governance. It proposes a Triadic Socio-Spiritual Framework comprising Material Flow, Desire Formation, and System Governance. The framework is an analytical construction rather than a historically observed integrated system. It complements—not replaces—established research on socio-technical transitions, demand-side mitigation, energy justice, and religious agency. The article also distinguishes normative ideals from historical performance, acknowledging tensions involving landholding, commerce, labor, resource use, and institutional power. It concludes that selected Catholic traditions can function as critical heuristic resources when their principles are translated into pluralistic, democratic, and justice-sensitive policy mechanisms rather than transferred as religious disciplines. The framework offers conceptual propositions and scope conditions for subsequent historical and empirical testing.