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Maurice Potron (1872-1942) is a French mathematician who, as early as 1911, conceived an economic model in which the analysis of production is based on the construction of a tableau similar to the one invented later by Leontief. Potron defined the notion of a satisfactory regime and studied its condition of existence by making use of the Perron-Frobenius theorem, well before that tool was known by economists. He also stated the first ever explicit duality result. We examine Potron’s life: he was a Jesuit and we point at the religious sources of his model. In that analysis, an important place is devoted to the social doctrine of the Church, which is totally revisited by and after the encyclical Rerum novarum. His family and himself were fully engaged in that renewal. We also explain why this pioneering work was ignored by economists for so many years.