In his first teaching document, Pope Leo insisted that putting the poor first is a social and political as well as a personal task
At first glance Pope Leo’s apostolic exhortation on love for the poor, Dilexi te (“I Have Loved You”) seems a personal, not a political appeal. Addressed “to all Christians”, it is a passionate plea to place solidarity with those living in poverty at the heart of the life of the Church.
Leo traces the long history of Christian ministry to the poor, inspired by the life and teaching of Jesus and manifest in the charitable institutions of the Church and its religious orders. Along with Pope Francis, whose initial draft he draws on, he foregrounds the Gospel call to love, serve, and learn from the poor in a world marked by scandalous inequality in the middle of prosperity.
It is Leo’s vivid description of the plight of the world’s poor – and his call to address it – that also gives Dilexi te a wider political resonance. He quotes extensively from Francis’ first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”) and its uncompromising critique of the global economy, which drew conservative ire when it was published in 2013.
“We must continue, then, to denounce the ‘dictatorship of an economy that kills’,” Leo writes, citing Francis’ famous phrase and echoing his condemnation of “ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation” and “reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control”.
In a remarkable passage, Leo also enlists Benedict XVI in his cause. “Amid the multiple crises that marked the beginning of the third millennium,” he writes, “the teaching of Benedict XVI took a more distinctly political turn” (emphasis added). Benedict’s 2009 social encyclical Caritas in Veritate (“Love in Truth”), published in the wake of the global financial crisis, called for better governance in service to the poor and vulnerable, nationally and internationally. “The more we strive to secure a common good corresponding to the real needs of our neighbours,” Benedict wrote in a passage that Leo cites, “the more effectively we love them.”
Like his predecessors, Leo does not offer policy blueprints.
But he, too, insists that service to the poor is a social and political as well as a personal task. “Are those born with fewer opportunities of lesser value as human beings? Should they limit themselves merely to surviving?” he asks. “The worth of our societies, and our own future, depends on the answers we give to these questions. Either we regain our moral and spiritual dignity or we fall into a cesspool.”
In setting out the moral and political imperative of love for the poor Leo draws on his experience as a missionary in Peru, elaborating two core ideas developed by Latin American bishops and embraced by Francis: a recognition of “social sin” and of “the poor as subjects”.
Like the idea of the “preferential option for the poor” championed by the Latin American bishops after the Second Vatican Council, the concept of social sin represented a vital contribution to Catholic Social Teaching.
As formulated at the 1979 bishops’ meeting in Puebla, Mexico, social sin refers to the deep social, economic and political structures that perpetuate poverty and violence and threaten human dignity in Latin America and on a global scale.
John Paul II made the related idea of “structures of sin” his own – and insisted on their eradication.
“Given the worldwide dimension which the social question has assumed,” Leo writes, citing John Paul’s 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis, “this love of preference for the poor, and the decisions which it inspires in us, cannot but embrace the immense multitudes of the hungry, the needy, the homeless, those without medical care and, above all, those without hope of a better future.”
Surveying our contemporary landscape decades later, Leo writes that “we need to be increasingly committed to resolving the structural causes of poverty” and, citing Francis, asserts that “I can only state once more that inequality ‘is the root of social ills’”.
The second theme Leo highlights from his Latin American experience, “the poor as subjects”, connects him closely with Francis and his legacy.
Here the foundational bishops’ document was drafted in 2007 in Aparecida, Brazil, under the chairmanship of then-archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
The Aparecida document highlighted “the need to consider marginalised communities as subjects capable of creating their own culture, rather than as objects of charity on the part of others”. Throughout his pontificate Francis emphasised the critical role of grassroots, popular movements in the political struggle against structural causes of poverty – a lack of access to work, housing and land.
In Dilexi te, Leo approvingly cites Francis on how popular movements help us to overcome “the idea of social policies being a policy for the poor, but never with the poor and never of the poor, much less part of a project which can bring people back together”.
If politicians and professionals do not consider the poor as subjects, Francis insisted, “democracy atrophies”, loses “its representative character and becomes disembodied, since it leaves out the people in their daily struggle for dignity, in the building of their future”.
While Leo’s critique of “social sin” and insistence on the “poor as subjects” gesture towards a transformational social and political agenda, his exhortation is most fundamentally an appeal to Christians to recognise and love the poor in their lives.
The final section of Dilexi te upholds almsgiving as a way to demonstrate solidarity with those in poverty we encounter day to day – respectfully, through accompaniment and the careful sharing of time and resources.
Ultimately, for Leo, the political pursuit of social justice and the personal practice of solidarity must go together.
“Through your work, your efforts to change unjust social structures or your simple, heartfelt gesture of closeness and support,” he closes his exhortation, “the poor will come to realise that Jesus’ words are addressed personally to each of them: ‘I have loved you’ (Revelation 3:9).”