Two months before Pope Francis first set foot on United States soil for a tour of America's northeast, he took a trip to South America, where he likened the uninhibited pursuit of money to "the dung of the devil."
His statement was part of a broader message that unbridled capitalism does not help the poor escape poverty, and many onlookers and analysts interpreted it as a challenge to the U.S. ahead of his trip.
"Individualism champions the American narrative, and that is just not how the pope operates," Claire Markham, outreach manager for the faith and progressive policy initiative at the Center for American Progress, told Mashable. "I just don't know that someone working hard and striving to be financially successful is something that resonates with the pope."
Instead, he called on people to fight a "new colonialism" that "takes on different faces" such as "corporations, loan agencies, certain free trade treaties, and the imposition of measures of austerity which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor."
He has reframed access to work as a human right, and called on Latin American nations to challenge more established powers in defense of poorer people the world over.
"The pope is not an anti-capitalist, he simply doesn't see any economic ideology that exists in the world at the moment as the answer to poverty," Markham said.
The pope himself said today that he's not a lefty, as Americans define the term, but merely following the church's mission of helping the poor.
That means the pope's message isn't so much anti-American as it is against the idea that capitalism is the foremost economic system of now and forever.
"Once capital becomes an idol and guides people's decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society," the pope said in July.
Dean Karlan, a poverty-focused economics professor at Yale University, told Mashable that the pope's message on poverty is that markets don't always work as people want them to, therefore the world shouldn't hold them in such high esteem.
That message, he said, is something straight out of lectures he gives at Yale.