Charism Capital launched on October 1, 2026 with an exciting and ambitious mandate: guided by the impact investing legacy of Catholic sisters, to cultivate an investment practice animated by Catholic Social Teaching (CST).
Charism’s work of applying CST principles to investing is anything but a smooth, easeful process or differentiating strategy. There are extensive questions, lingering debates, and procedural uncertainties about how—even if—CST should bear on investing:
How can the principles of CST be operationalized in investment decision-making processes?
How does CST conceptualize the financial categories of prudence and risk?
What do the challenging principles of the Preferential Option for the Poor and the Universal Destination of Goods mean for investors?
Taking these questions seriously opens Charism to the hard, often blundering work of reflection, disagreement, dissatisfaction, and reiteration. In doing so, it asks the Charism community to assume a posture of experimentation. In a world marked by the enormous reach of finance and its sleek economic maxims, the experiment of holding together finance with theology, economics with soul is a worthy one. Its essence is reflected in the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous quote about the necessity of “friction” for meaningful philosophy and with it, meaningful life:
“The more closely we examine actual language, the greater becomes the conflict between it and our requirement…[W]e have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction, and so, in a certain sense, the conditions are ideal; but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”
With its lofty and beautiful language so neatly packaged in encyclicals, CST can become “slippery” if it remains an intellectual exercise or matter of shallow, personal inspiration. The currents that push us to understand and participate in economics as a scientific enterprise are quite strong, too. Theories and paradigms remove friction: the mandates to maximize return and minimize risk unjustly simplify finance and its work. If we’re not careful, they can also limit our understanding of what's possible and stunt our capacity to build alternatives.
In his book Enacting Catholic Social Tradition: The Deep Practice of Human Dignity, moral theologian Clemens Sedmak writes about the necessity of “inhabiting” moral and theological principles, of making them “our own.” It is only through habituation, when paired with the grace of God, that we discover what CST demands of us in our particular time, place, and vocation. As we learn from the life of Christ and read in the Sermon on the Mount, the Christian life is a constant invitation to this kind of concretization:
Blessed are the Merciful.
Blessed are those who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness.
Blessed are the Peacemakers.
Having mercy, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, and building peace are laborious, gritty, relational ways of being. How can these be translated into our financial practice?
As we are learning through Charism, seeking to habitualize CST in finance creates friction. But it is here that we grow closer to, as Pope Leo XIV writes in Magnifica Humanitas 120, the “wonders of the soul.”
To embrace this kind of meaningful and transcendent friction, we need a community committed to connection, courage, and learning. By asking the right questions of finance and its purpose—inspired by the lives, legacy, and witness of Catholic sisters—we can begin the work of illuminating a different, soul-filled way of using and relating to money.
Let’s return to the rough ground!
