Vatican Urges Churches to Pull Investments from Mining Companies

The Vatican has initiated a new effort urging Catholic churches to withdraw their investments from mining companies, citing environmental concerns and harm to indigenous communities. The campaign draws inspiration from Pope Francis' environmental teachings and aims to align church investments with Catholic ecological values.

ROME — Church leaders at the Vatican announced Friday a new initiative pushing Catholic institutions to withdraw financial investments from mining companies, arguing that church funds should reflect Catholic environmental principles.

The movement draws from Pope Francis’ 2015 environmental document “Praised Be,” which criticized multinational companies for exploiting Earth’s resources while harming impoverished and Indigenous communities.

Behind this effort is the Churches and Mining Network, an interfaith coalition of Catholic and other Christian groups particularly active throughout Latin America.

The program seeks to motivate individual parishes to examine their investment portfolios and withdraw funds where appropriate, while also providing Indigenous communities with information about resource extraction activities on their ancestral lands.

At a Vatican press conference, Yolanda Flores, an Aymara leader from Peru, became emotional while explaining how Indigenous mothers worry about contaminating their children through polluted drinking water caused by mining operations.

“The big question is: Who finances this? Who provides the money to poison us?” she said.

Guatemalan Cardinal Álvaro Ramazzini shared his experience as bishop of San Marcos, where the government permitted a Canadian company to explore and extract precious metals from local territory. Though the operation created temporary jobs for residents, shareholders ultimately benefited most, he explained.

“Was it a legal activity? Yes. Was it an activity that promoted the holistic development of those communities? No,” Ramazzini said. “In terms of distributive justice: were the mining operations fair? No.”

When asked whether the Vatican had previously invested in mining corporations and was now reassessing its approach, Cardinal Fabio Baggio from the Vatican’s ecology department said he was uncertain but noted that such campaigns require institutions to “also look in one’s home.”

In 2022, Francis established an investment committee combining church officials and external financial advisors to ensure “the ethical nature of the Holy See’s securities investments according to the church’s social doctrine and at the same time their profitability, adequacy and risks.”

The Vatican bank revealed last month two new investment benchmarks following Catholic ethical standards, designed to guide Catholic investments worldwide: the Morningstar IOR Eurozone Catholic Principles and the Morningstar IOR US Catholic Principles.