Pope Leo XIV’s first major proclamation, Dilexi Te (I Have Loved You), is an apostolic exhortation addressed “to all Christians” on caring for the poor. Pope Francis was preparing this exhortation when he died. Leo finished the project, and he was “happy to make this document my own—adding some reflections.”
Exhortations do not normally proclaim doctrinal development or analyze complexity the way an encyclical does. An exhortation, rather, is supposed to do as its name implies: exhort the faithful to action.
What exactly does Dilexi Te exhort Christians to do?
Dilexi Te exhorts Christians to show special concern for the poor and vulnerable and to measure societies by how well they do this. It succeeds as a spiritual exercise in its Christological focus on almsgiving.
What every faithful reader needs to know, however, is that exactly how to care for the poor requires data on the complex causes of their condition as well as the application of the virtue of prudence when it comes to attempted solutions.
According to Leo XIV, the Bible and the early church fathers in both East and West “affirm that offerings, when born of love, not only alleviate the needs of one’s brother or sister, but also purify the heart of the giver.”
The life and teaching of Jesus, Leo says, show that “one cannot love God without extending one’s love to the poor.” The pope notes that Jesus began his public ministry in a synagogue, claiming that he had been “anointed to bring good news to the poor.”
Pope Leo emphasizes how monasteries, religious orders, and individual persons have taken “the good news to the poor” since the church’s early centuries. The cast of characters is a long one. It includes Ambrose, Augustine, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Cyprian, Benedict, John Chrysostom, and Basil. Medieval saints like Dominic and Francis appear in this telling, as well as lesser-known individuals like Camillus de Lellis and Vincent de Paul.
Leo’s list of personages is meant to provide overwhelming evidence that caring for the poor is not an optional addendum to the Christian faith. Rather, the Christian life and salvation entail seeing “the suffering of Christ himself” in “the wounded faces of the poor.”’
There are two other things we can learn from this list, although only implicitly.
The first is that while these acts of heroic love are deeply inspiring, as intended by Leo, they also show that individual human action matters a great deal. So does personal charity. Love is not a technique, and there is no technical solution to poverty.
The second implicit conclusion we can draw from the history provided by the pope has to do with the role of non-state actors in poverty alleviation. Christians should not relinquish charity to their government. When Christians assume that poverty is primarily the responsibility of the state, the tendency is to stop being charitable because we know someone else is being charitable for us. The result is the opposite of a loving disposition toward the poor.
Pope Leo XIV makes clear that a Christian cannot not love the poor and remain a faithful Christian. Thomas Aquinas defined love as willing the good of the other. To will another’s good, we first must know what that good is, what stands in its way, and what we can do to remove the obstacles.
This leads to more questions, questions that Dilexi Te does not deal with. These questions include who the poor are, where “the poor” are, and why they are poor.
Only when we know the answers to these questions, which will vary according to time and place and person, can we know what the best way is to care for them as persons with innate creative capacities and not as objects that are “problems to be solved.”
For example, direct aid might be what is most needed at a particular moment for someone displaced by war and oppression. In the developed West, however, the roots of poverty are far more likely to be found in sexual or physical abuse, family breakdown, substandard education, and drug addiction.
Pope Leo recognizes that “there are many forms of poverty.” These include the “poverty of those who lack material means of subsistence, the poverty of those who are socially marginalized and lack the means to give voice to their dignity and abilities, moral and spiritual poverty, cultural poverty, the poverty of those who find themselves in a condition of personal or social weakness or fragility, the poverty of those who have no rights, no space, no freedom.”
Unfortunately, Dilexi Te, due to its spiritual focus on almsgiving, does not maintain this holistic sense of poverty throughout. But what should almsgiving look like in the 21st century? What should it look like in sub-Saharan Africa, where the majority of those in extreme poverty live? Will it look different in south Asia than it does in South America? Will it look different in western Europe than it does in the United States?
According to the United Nations and the World Bank, there has been a significant decrease in global poverty since 1990. In raw numbers, more than one billion people have come out of poverty. The rate of extreme poverty in the world in 1990 was 38%. By 2014, this was down to 11.2%. It is around 10% now.
Pope Leo says, “At times, pseudo scientific data are invoked to support the claims that a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty.” Is this UN data the “pseudo-scientific data” to which he is referring? Is this the data the pope says “is sometimes ‘interpreted’ to convince us that the situation of the poor is not so serious”?
We should interpret and understand data, not dismiss it.
According to the UN, most of the extreme poverty is in sub-Saharan Africa. Will almsgiving alone create the conditions that enable men and women to build prosperous families? Or is something more required?
Sub-Saharan Africa in many places lacks a strong rule of law and protection for private property. These same areas suffer from corruption, regulatory bureaucracy, war, and the displacement of peoples. All these things combine to help keep people in poverty and to create the conditions for poverty. This is the “economy that kills.”
Again, how best to help the poor depends on who the poor are, where they are, and why they are poor. What kind of economy is it that allows people to create prosperity rather than condemning them to poverty?
John Paul II, in an encyclical that regrettably does not receive much attention in Dilexi Te, speaks exactly to the question of what kind of economy best enables people to create prosperity. “The Marxist solution has failed,” writes John Paul II in Centesimus Annus, “but the realities of marginalization and exploitation remain in the world, especially the Third World.” Moreover, there is the poverty of “human alienation, especially in the more advanced countries.”
Is “capitalism” the answer? John Paul II notes the complexity of this question:
If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy,” “market economy” or simply “free economy.”
But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.
Dilexi Te seems to identify the “economy that kills” with John Paul II’s “free economy” or “market economy” rather than with the economy the Polish-born pontiff condemns.
Is John Paul II, then, engaging in the kind of “economic thinking” that Leo XIV says “requires us to wait for invisible market forces to resolve everything”? No. Indeed, it is next to impossible to find anyone with any sense of the principles of Catholic Social Teaching who is. This includes especially those who advocate that the best means of reducing poverty is the kind of free economy praised by John Paul II.
Authentic poverty alleviation will look very different in the developed world than in the developing world because the causes are often different. This is why we ought to be studying the forces that have been behind the historic reductions in extreme poverty, especially in south Asia and east Asia, where poverty has dropped exponentially in the past couple of decades.
Leo is right that a free market economy will not “automatically solve the problem of poverty.” Neither, however, will almsgiving, whether in the culture of death we find in Western societies or in those places in the world where a culture of despair reigns because the creative nature of the human person is burdened by corruption and lawlessness.
There will always be a need for personal charity and almsgiving. Protection of private property under the rule of law, however, has proved essential to the creation of prosperity.
