How to Read Pope Leo’s Sermon on Loving the Poor

The first major document of the first American pope’s pontificate was released this week. In Dilexi Te, which takes its title (as papal documents do) from its first words, “I have loved you” (Revelation 3:9), Pope Leo XIV reflects on the necessity for Christians, who have been loved first by Christ, to show love and care for the poor.

Some liberals are predictably attempting to wield Dilexi Te as a partisan club, scolding conservative Christians for their supposed lack of compassion. Most conservatives, meanwhile, are praising its traditional nature, though demurring on a very few lines that have been quoted by the leftist partisans.

This “apostolic exhortation,” a papal document of lower authoritative weight than an “encyclical,” is more like a very long (about 20,000 words) sermon. The best way to read it is not for political points with which to dunk on opponents, but as an exhortation to personal and even political action that is grounded in faith, hope, and love.

Readers will (sometimes rightly) criticize passages in this document, but they will find much encouragement and inspiration. Pope Francis, as Leo admits, was preparing this document at the end of his life. Leo’s decision to finish the document is no doubt an act signaling continuity with the late pope. While some might lament any sign of continuity with Francis, Leo seems determined to be a peacemaker—not stomping on the legacy of his predecessor as Francis himself often did to John Paul II and Benedict XVI. In fact, though Francis is quoted a great many times, so too are those two popes who preceded him.

In any case, the main themes of this document do not depart from the greater Catholic Tradition. Dilexi Te’s coremessage is that care for the poor is inseparable from Christian life. To follow the Lord means to do what he asks. And He asks insistently that His disciples look to the poor, the needy, the suffering, and the outcast. Jesus’ account of the last judgment shows that this is the test and sign of truly accepting the gift and burden of faith. Those accounted true sheep will be told: “Just as you did it to the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).

It is not the Gospels alone that send this message. The Old and New Testaments both give testimony to the Lord’s care for the cries of the poor and our duty to care for them especially. The Catholic Tradition has lately spoken of a “preferential option on the part of God for the poor.” Leo clarifies that this phrase “never indicates exclusivity or discrimination towards other groups, which would be impossible for God.”

Though Leo, who spent much of his ministry in Latin America, quotes Latin American documents, he wants to avoid the mistakes of the “liberation theologians.” He even quotes the Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation” on the dual requirements of orthodoxy of teaching and service to the poor. That 1984 document of the Vatican’s doctrinal office corrected the often Marxist-influenced errors of liberation theology.    

While Leo surveys the modern Catholic Social Tradition, Dilexi Te ranges over all Christian history. Besides the biblical witnesses of law and prophets, Gospels and epistles, he quotes or sketches the witness of more than thirty great saints who exemplified Christian love.

The Augustinian friar pope’s beloved St. Augustine is cited to make the point that “What you give to the poor is not your property but theirs.” St. John Chrysostom testifies that the Christian must “let the poor benefit from your riches” because “God does not need golden vessels, but golden souls.” The monastic tradition demonstrates the pairing of intense prayer and service to the poor. And St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta explains this pairing: “The fruit of silence is prayer; the fruit of prayer is faith; the fruit of faith is love; the fruit of love is service.”

Many more and less familiar figures appear to show that faith and love must always be combined and that the poor are to be cared for because they bear God’s image. The poor bring with them the opportunity to meet and, per Matthew 25, serve Christ himself.

Leo does not stay at the individual level. He discusses so-called “structures of sin,” unjust and inequitable arrangements at the level of policy and practice keeping people down. It is here that a bit of the rhetoric one came to expect from Francis slips in.

Leo speaks rather romantically of duties to welcome migrants without corresponding reminders of the duty of countries to protect their own borders, culture, and society—or the responsibilities of migrants to respect the laws of the places they wish to go. He says that “pseudo-scientific data are invoked to support the claim that a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty.” I’ve long been in free market circles and never heard this claim.

Despite some imbalanced bits such as the above, Leo largely stays in balance. Rather than specific policy critiques or his own prescriptions to complicated questions, Leo advocates for “a constant interaction between the faithful and the Church’s magisterium, between ordinary citizens and experts, between individuals and institutions.” Christians can and will disagree about what is wrong with many governmental and economic structures—and how to fix them.

Leo acknowledges these questions are complicated: poverty has many causes, not all strictly material. He specifies that helping people find work is essential to human dignity and that welfare should usually be provisional. He insists the Church, like Saint Francis’s brotherhood, must not be simply a social service organization. She must tend to the poor’s spiritual as well as bodily needs.

C.S. Lewis’s avuncular demon Screwtape described the attitude desired by “the Enemy”—aka God—in his 16th letter to his nephew Wormwood. That attitude “may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful” but “does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going.” If the Christian assumes this attitude, especially when it comes to sermons, it “creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy) in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul.”

“Love God” and “love the poor” are indeed platitudes, but we need them to pierce through our mental noise. Read well, Dilexi Te helps make that happen.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.