By Pope Leo XIV’s own account, Dilexi Te, his first apostolic exhortation (and first major papal document), is a text that “Pope Francis was preparing in the last months of his life,” to which Leo is “adding some reflections” (Dilexi Te §3). This is well, not only because Leo is interested in stressing his own continuity with Francis on the priority of care for the poor, but because the document itself insists on this priority’s centrality to the whole tradition of the Church. Indeed, Dilexi Te is a tour de force of ecclesiastical history, showing how, at every point, what we now call the “preferential option for the poor” has reflected what the Church has believed about the Divine persons and Divine love. As Leo says late in the exhortation, “I have chosen to recall the age-old history of the Church’s care for the poor and with the poor in order to make clear that it has always been a central part of her life” (§103).
Leo reminds us in so many words that “care for the poor has always characterized the presence of the Church in the world” (fn 22), an understatement if anything, and even cautions us not to see the document’s examples as an exhaustive list. He shows that “the Fathers of the Church recognized in the poor a privileged way to reach God, a special way to meet him” (§39), that “charity is not optional but a requirement of true worship” (§42), that “[a]nyone who says they love God and has no compassion for the needy is lying” (§45), and that “the Gospel is proclaimed correctly only when it impels us to touch the flesh of the least among us….doctrinal rigor without mercy is empty talk” (§48).
Moving from this overview of the Church Fathers to a series of specific dimensions of care for the poor, the exhortation covers care for the sick (§§49-52), for visitors to monasteries (§§53-58; Chesterton somewhat romantically referred to the monasteries of medieval England as “the wall of the weak”), and for prisoners (§§59-62). Dilexi Te then relates the histories of the mendicant orders (§§63-67), Catholic education for the poor (§§68-72), and accompaniment of migrants (§§73-75). At several points this series of thematic histories presents a uniformly positive assessment of something secular historians would see as having had more downsides, such as with the relationship between early Franciscan and Dominican excoriations of wealth and medieval European antisemitism. Yet the point of this history is not to present a warts-and-all account of how the Church has handled its duty to the poor. It is instead to stress the centrality of this duty, whether it is being discharged in an ideal way at any given time or by any given Catholic or not.
Page after page is spent on this history before Leo even touches on the modern tradition of Catholic social teaching inaugurated by his namesake Leo XIII in the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. I don’t think this is a coincidence or an incidental feature of the document’s structure, especially since some of the figures and events discussed in the thematic overviews postdate Rerum Novarum by many decades. Rather, I think this is intended to exclude the possibility that the preferential option for the poor is some sort of accident of Church history, that this is a theology of a particular era in the Church’s journey through time and space. Yet our own Pope Leo does see something providential about Catholic social teaching as having developed in our time, our era, our living memory. Quoting the Vatican II Council father Giacomo Lercaro, Dilexi Te reminds us that “This is the hour of the poor, of the millions of the poor throughout the world. This is the hour of the mystery of the Church as mother of the poor. This is the hour of the mystery of Christ, present especially in the poor” (§84). This is the hour. The Church has stood for two thousand years, and we will always have the poor with us (a difficult line from Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, and one that Dilexi Te discusses and analyzes in §§4-5). Yet this is the hour. In our time, in our circumstances, poverty takes on a special character and a special importance. The fact that poor people today have access to resources that would have been beyond even rich people’s wildest dreams a few centuries ago is not the point. “Poverty must always be understood and gauged in the context of the actual opportunities available in each concrete historical period” (§13, quoting Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti). A time and a civilization can be wealthy; ours is. Yet there are still the poor, excluded or marginal, demanding (morally if not verbally), like Lazarus at the rich man’s gates, to be let further in.
Pope Leo observes that Latin America, Francis’s (and, by choice, his own) region of the world, has produced much of the body of today’s theology “rethinking the Church’s relationship with the poor” (§89). Among the themes of this Latin American theology he highlights structures of sin within society (§§90-98) and the poor as subjects rather than objects (§§99-102). Coming from our age and from a particular part of the world, these themes are nevertheless valid for the whole Church and the whole sweep of Christian history. After all, Dilexi Te says, quoting Pope Gregory the Great, “[e]very minute we can find a Lazarus if we seek him, and every day, even without seeking, we find one at our door”; not only this, even if a given poor person is behaving reprehensibly, “the fire of poverty is perhaps purifying their sinful actions” (§108)! We must not, therefore, approach poverty as a technical social problem to be solved through political and economic tinkering; the cry of the poor is first and foremost a spiritual cry. Spiritual and yet immediate, personal, and binding on all Christians, as Pope Leo makes clear in a final section dealing with almsgiving (§§115-121).
Thus concludes Dilexi Te, a document that firmly and irreversibly roots the specifics of today’s Catholic social doctrine in the biblical, patristic, and historical dimensions of our theology and our faith. At points the document seems more Francis (quoting him extensively and employing some of his characteristic proverbs or aphorisms), at times more Leo (such as in the discussion of Augustine). Overall, however, the text is a clear, consistent whole, speaking with one voice, and not only one voice out of two, but one voice out of the whole cloud of witnesses. In illo Uno unum.
Image: Lazarus at the rich man’s door, from the eleventh-century German Codex Aureus of Echternach. From Wikimedia Commons.
Nathan Turowsky—a native New Englander, an alumnus of Boston University School of Theology, and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution—works in the nonprofit sector and writes at Silicate Siesta.
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