Can Communion Be Measured?

The first time I heard about the Economy of Communion I was a young student, sitting in a conference hall in Villafranca, where an economist spoke about what economics does not see. I still have my notes, written in the hurried style of someone who did not yet know which ideas would stay with him. The first line reads: “the essential is invisible to the eyes… of economics.”¹ His point, as I wrote it down then, was that human relationships (trust, family life, the gift contained in good work) are goods that science and politics fail to see, and without which life does not flourish and the economy does not work.² Further down, the notes record a second claim, about the enterprises that put their profits in common: they needed scientific dignity, because the Economy of Communion “is not a bonsai, it is a seed.”³

This week in London I saw that seed take a new form. At the Shape the World Summit in Lambeth Palace, Lawrence Chong launched the Multi-Faith Economy Index and the associated Mark on behalf of Consulus, the Singapore-based company he founded, which has practised the Economy of Communion for two decades and has built a global network around it.⁴ The Index is a classification and accreditation system that evaluates funds, managers and assets, and its evaluation rests on two pillars: adherence to the ethical principles of the faith tradition each fund declares, and social impact assessed through the seven impact measures that Consulus has developed from the Economy of Communion. In particular, partnerships across different faith traditions count as an additional criterion, which makes the Index an instrument of interreligious dialogue as much as of finance. Consulus traces the idea back to Pope Francis’s address to the Economy of Communion in 2017, which asked not only to care for the victims of the economy but to change the rules of the game that produce them.⁵ Indeed, the Index is an attempt to change one of those rules, i.e. what the market is able to see.

We should take this move seriously, because it answers a real problem. Capital flows towards what it can read, i.e. ratings, standards, indices and disclosures, and whatever remains invisible to these instruments does not orient decisions, however valuable it may be. Islamic finance offers the clearest precedent, since it became a recognised segment of global markets once its principles were translated into shared standards and certifications.⁶ Indeed, during the discussion on the first day in London, the most pressing question from the floor was a definitional one: what counts as faith-based finance? It might be the assets held by religious institutions, the savings of believers, or capital managed according to principles drawn from a faith tradition. These are different objects, and an index has to decide which of them it measures before it can measure anything at all.

However, the same notes from Villafranca contain the strongest objection to any attempt of this kind. The economist argued that firms cannot buy the gift that makes work good: they either try to take it for free or try to purchase it with benefits and flexible hours, and in both cases they fail, because what they want can only be given. Relational goods share this structure. In particular, a relational good exists only within the relationship that produces it, and when it is pursued as a means to something else (a better rating, access to capital) it tends to disappear. Measurement adds a second difficulty, well known to economists as Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.⁷ This is the trap into which much of the ESG world has fallen, and Lawrence himself observed in London that many products are sold under that label without anything behind them⁸; the Multi-Faith Economy Index is conceived precisely as an answer to this problem.

Thus the relevant question concerns the conditions under which a relational good can be made visible without being turned into a performance, since an Economy of Communion that remains invisible cannot change the rules of the game. The methodology of the Index already contains part of the answer. Self-declarations are validated by an expert panel, which can request audits and interview the leadership, and every entity is reviewed every year, so that the Index tracks growth and consistency over time rather than offering a static snapshot. Let us add two conditions that seem to us necessary for this design to deliver what it promises. The first is conceptual: definitions must be explicit and public, so that it is clear what each measure tracks and what it leaves out; indeed, an indicator always selects, and the selection is a theoretical choice that should be open to discussion. The second is institutional: the verification should include voices external to the governance of the Index, such as universities and research centres, whose findings are published whatever they show.

This is where universities have a specific contribution to make, and where the partnership between Consulus and Sophia University Institute finds its meaning. Sophia, founded by Chiara Lubich, has just started the first master’s degree in the Economy of Communion⁹, and is working with Consulus on a joint report on Catholic stewardship and on a leadership programme to be hosted in Loppiano. In particular, longitudinal cases matter more than rankings. In London, the first accreditation went to a Nigerian agricultural company whose farmers, Muslim and Christian, organise themselves into mutual trust groups that share risk and access to credit. Following such a case over a decade, and asking what the accreditation changes in the life of those communities, would tell us more about communion than any annual snapshot, and it is the kind of research the Index makes possible for the first time.

In Villafranca, the economist hoped that the Economy of Communion would one day receive scientific dignity. Fifteen years later the request has changed its source: it now comes from investors and faith communities who want to know what their money does, and Lawrence and the Consulus network have had the courage to answer it with an instrument that can be tested and improved. Indeed, a seed that grows becomes visible, and visibility exposes it to being measured and compared. The task now is to make sure that the instruments built to see it are adequate to what they are meant to see, which requires both the conceptual care of the first condition and the patience of the second. This is a task to be carried out together, and at Sophia we intend to take our part in it.

Cover: detail of the visual of the Consulus Global School 2026, London, 14–16 October 2026, courtesy of Consulus.

Footnotes

1. The line plays on the fox’s secret in A. de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943, ch. XXI: “l’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux”. ↩

2. On relational goods see C. J. Uhlaner, “‘Relational goods’ and participation: incorporating sociability into a theory of rational action”, Public Choice 62 (1989), 253–285; B. Gui and R. Sugden (eds.), Economics and Social Interaction: Accounting for Interpersonal Relations, Cambridge University Press, 2005. ↩

3. Chiara Lubich launched the Economy of Communion in São Paulo in May 1991. See L. Bruni (ed.), The Economy of Communion: Toward a Multi-Dimensional Economic Culture, New City Press, 2002. ↩

4. Consulus, “Shape the World Summit 2026 unveils programme and speakers for Lambeth Palace ahead of the official announcement of the world’s first Multi-Faith Economy Index and Mark”; see also “The Columnist, August 2026: Measuring and tracking faith based economy”. ↩

5. Pope Francis, Address to participants in the meeting “Economy of Communion”, 4 February 2017: “we must work toward changing the rules of the game of the socio-economic system.” ↩

6. The main standard-setting bodies are the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI), established in Bahrain in 1991, and the Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB), established in Kuala Lumpur in 2002. ↩

7. C. A. E. Goodhart, “Problems of monetary management: the U.K. experience”, in Papers in Monetary Economics, vol. 1, Reserve Bank of Australia, 1975. The formulation quoted here is due to M. Strathern, “‘Improving ratings’: audit in the British university system”, European Review 5 (1997), 305–321. ↩

8. On how little ESG ratings agree with one another, see F. Berg, J. F. Kölbel and R. Rigobon, “Aggregate confusion: the divergence of ESG ratings”, Review of Finance 26 (2022), 1315–1344. ↩

9. Sophia University Institute, “New study programme announced for 2026/27”. ↩