“I stand here before you to state categorically that Machiavelli is dead.”

Thus Argentine President Javier Milei began an impressive, if not somewhat brash, speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Jan. 21. Citing Austrian School American economist Murray Rothbard, Milei stated with conviction that “only the ethical principles underlying Western culture can serve as efficiency criteria when it comes to making public policy decisions.”

At the core of the Western culture so valued by Milei and Rothbard is, of course, a respect for private property, which — relying on another Austrian School economist, Jesús Huerta de Soto — Milei identifies as (along with free enterprise) the one schema truly compatible with dynamic economic efficiency.

A careful consideration of private property and Catholic teaching is all the more imperative as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American founding, particularly since the Fifth Amendment protects citizens from the public appropriation of private property without just compensation.

Milei’s outlook is all the more interesting when we compare it to another Argentine’s assertion 10 years ago that “the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable” (Laudato Si’). That, of course, was Pope Francis, who doubled down on his assertion five years later in Fratelli Tutti.

Many were disconcerted by the Holy Father’s frequent appeals to the “universal destination of goods,” including Milei who, before warming up to his compatriot later, called him a “filthy leftist” and an “imbecile.”

Few, it seemed, were willing to admit, or perhaps were unaware, that the Catechism of the Catholic Church basically teaches precisely what Milei and many others found objectionable in Francis’ characterization of the right to private property in Laudato Si’.

What the Catechism does not do — and what Francis was trying to do — was to expand on how the principles of private property and the universal destination of goods are related in the context of the challenges we face in “caring for our common home,” as the official title of Laudato Si’ suggests.

Having played a part in the long and laborious genesis of Laudato Si’ while working at the Vatican Secretariat of State, I feel compelled to respond to mischaracterizations of the Church’s teaching on private property as libertarian and her teaching on the universal destination of goods as communist. Both ideas, of course, are absurd.

I’ll be the first to admit that Francis’ subordination of private property to the universal destination of the earth’s goods in Fratelli Tutti is uncommonly strong:

The right to private property is always accompanied by the primary and prior principle of the subordination of all private property to the universal destination of the earth’s goods, and thus the right of all to their use.

Rightly understood, however, not only is his assertion not in conflict with Catholic social teaching, but it can readily be supported by prior magisterial teaching. Unfortunately, Francis opened the door to suspicion by choosing to footnote no one but himself when he made the assertion in Fratelli Tutti.

So, just how are we to understand the relationship between these two principles? There is no single answer, but perhaps a personal anecdote might help shed some light on the issue.

Several years ago, my family and the family living next door discovered a common interest based on two uncommon concerns. The common interest was to place a fence between our two properties. For our part, the concern was to partially obstruct the view of our backyard from the front street. For their part, the concern was to prevent their kids’ balls and toys from rolling down the hill into our backyard. The issue was where to place the fence and who would pay for it.

Although the neighbors had been deliberating a fence long before we moved in, it was I who first raised the idea with Piotr, who by then had become a friend, just as he and his wife’s children had befriended ours. We were on good terms. I had already calculated the cost of the fence and developed a plan, so Piotr was as ready to accept my proposal as I was to carry it out and pay for the project myself.

Call it serendipity, but on a theoretical level, there was more going on here than meets the eye. If we hadn’t had the freedom to talk about the various possibilities and come to a resolution on our own, the process would have been much more arduous, if not impossible.

If we hadn’t been on good terms and in conversation with one another, we would have easily put up two separate fences, one on his property and one on mine. And if we really wanted to be fair about it, we would have split the cost after we decided whose property to build the fence on.

This meager concern of two next-door neighbors may seem a far cry from the universal destination of goods, but it does shed light on how two families — both of which, incidentally, were Christian (they Orthodox, we Catholic) — can broaden the horizon of the common good in a way that transcends the sheer inviolability of private property.

The right to our respective backyards was not “absolute” since, through deliberation and mutual agreement, we were not unwilling and unable to find a way to foster our common interest in a way that involved neither placing the fence directly on the property line (something forbidden by a local ordinance) nor splitting the cost 50-50.

Though the scale is much grander and the scope much wider, practices associated with the universal destination of goods are not entirely different from the scenario with my neighbor. That scenario offers a framework for understanding why Pope Francis was searching for a way to derive the principle of private property from the principle of the universal destination of created goods.

“The right to private property,” he wrote in Fratelli Tutti, “can only be considered a secondary natural right, derived from the principle of the universal destination of created goods. This has concrete consequences that ought to be reflected in the workings of society. Yet it often happens that secondary rights displace primary and overriding rights, in practice making them irrelevant.”

It may be difficult to challenge Francis’s derivation of the right to private property from the principle of universal destination on a theoretical level, but on a practical level, it’s entirely possible to disagree with him on the prudence of subordinating the former to the latter. Philip Booth, for example, argues cogently that Laudato Si’ “would have been a more rounded document if it had considered the importance of private property for the protection of the environment.”

Admittedly, it may have turned out better if Francis had limited his vocabulary in Laudato Si’ to what we find in the Catechism (2403), which, rather than criticizing the alleged “inviolability” or “absoluteness” of the right to private property, simply speaks of the universal destination of goods as “primordial” (primordialis).

In any case, in his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te, Pope Leo XIV demonstrates that the issue of how to relate the right to private property to the universal destination of goods is not going away anytime soon. Leo, like Francis, bases his teaching on the universal destination of goods on Vatican II. Gaudium et Spes states:

God destined the earth and all it contains for all people and nations so that all created things would be shared fairly by all humankind under the guidance of justice tempered by charity. … In their use of things people should regard the external goods they lawfully possess as not just their own but common to others as well, in the sense that they can benefit others as well as themselves. Therefore, everyone has the right to possess a sufficient amount of the earth’s goods for themselves and their family. … Persons in extreme necessity are entitled to take what they need from the riches of others. … By its nature, private property has a social dimension that is based on the law of the common destination of earthly goods. Whenever the social aspect is forgotten, ownership can often become the object of greed and a source of serious disorder.

This lengthy quote is necessary to remind us of magisterial teaching in 1965, which is presumably based on the Church’s preceding tradition. The real question, then, is whether Francis and Leo have interpreted the conciliar teaching correctly, and if they have, whether the Second Vatican Council got the tradition right in the first place.

Daniel B. Gallagher is a lecturer in philosophy and literature at Ralston College. He worked for a decade at the Vatican’s Secretariat of State under Popes Benedict XVI and Francis.