A little platoon of high-profile Republican members of Congress, most of whom harbor national ambitions, has stepped forward in recent weeks to make the case for a more activist GOP policy toward the problem of poverty. A number of conservative intellectuals have also been weighing in. It’s doubtful that a wide-ranging conservative anti-poverty agenda is about to become the first plank in the GOP platform any time soon. But the felt need among Republicans to speak to the issue is an indication of how the domestic policy debate has been shifting.

There are several causes underlying this shift, some on the right and some on the left, some substantive and some political. I would usually give the political motivations consideration first, on the perhaps cynical grounds that where a politician’s interest goes, his or her heart will follow. But with one exception—Obama and the Democrats’ pushback against social inequality—calculations of political interest haven’t changed that much, and the pressure from Democrats on the subject has not been enough by itself to force a new line out of the GOP.

So, substance anyone? First up, I think, is a certain Pope Francis. Although the Catholic Church is far less politically salient in electoral politics than it was before the pedophilia scandal—when in many places politicians both Republican and Democratic would avoid provoking a confrontation on Church teachings—if anybody is going to put the fear of God back into the system, paradoxically, it’s the amiable Francis. His shift in priorities to an evangelization that reaches out to people where they are, whoever they are, has already unsettled the more doctrinally conservative American amici Pontifex. Now, his remarks on the insufficiency of the capitalist system and his evident distress with its unequal outcomes are threatening to undo the Church’s thirty-years truce with “liberalization” in the classical sense.

As it happens, the amici pecuniarium are hardly without arguments in response to the Pope. The hundreds of millions of Chinese who have managed to exit poverty and join the ranks of the global middle class over the past couple decades owe their improved material circumstances to the workings of markets, not the fine sentiments of the clergy, let alone Mao’s can’t-make-an-omelet-without-breaking-eggs-style ruthless egalitarianism. But Francis has opened or reopened a front to which a certain kind of conservative politician, probably but not necessarily Catholic, must pay attention. A defense of capitalism these days requires an answer to the question: “What about the poor?” And the reply, “you will always have the poor among you, [so what’s the big deal?],” is a misreading of the relevant Scripture passage.

More broadly, the moral defense of capitalism in America must now grapple with a social reality that used to cut in its favor, namely, social mobility. Being poor is worse if it means you are permanently stuck in poverty than if you have a reasonable expectation of working yourself out of it, or at least that your children will be able to. This mobility was once a marquee feature of the American dream. Recent measurements suggest that social mobility isn’t what it used to be, however, and that’s a problem. It’s certainly a worse problem for those on the bottom, but there is something a little unsettling about “too rich to fail” as well: Certainly the conservative literature in defense of capitalism has granted special resonance to the cases of the dissolute sons and daughters of great wealth who managed to blow the family fortune rather than augment it. Here, too, was a kind of fairness to the system.