“So you say you love the poor? Name them.”—Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez
Earlier this month, the first writing by Pope Leo XIV dropped, and it had the Internet all a-fluttering, as the first major writing by a pope usually does. First writings send out signals of things to come, the way that the Pope views himself with reference to the Tradition he is inheriting, his place in the world, and more.
The exhortation is framed as a sequel to Francis’s Dilexit Nos, on the love of Jesus, a theme I’ll return to shortly. But for the Pope to come out of the gate writing about the love for the poor sent a strong signal of an emphasis on social teaching. At one level, the theme of God’s love for the poor is not that controversial or unexpected. It’s good old fashioned traditional fare: there is, nor should there be, anything controversial about saying that God’s love especially has in view the poor.
If you’re looking for a brief primer on how Christians have thought about God’s love of the poor as a central concern of God, Dilexit Te is your tutor. It’s an excellent rendering of traditional Christian teaching about the poor, walking the reader through not only the Biblical material on God’s love of the poor, but on Christian history’s robust clarity on this point. For those only familiar with more recent history, what emerges through the exhortation is the clear way in which God’s concern for the poor is not a latecomer teaching to Christian doctrine, somehow the product of Latin American Marxists. Chapter Three of the work is devoted entirely to tracing the legacy of this teaching from the age of the apostles forward: from the 2nd century to the present, God’s particular care for the poor is carried forward in a complex, yet unbroken fashion.
To those unfamiliar with this vein of teaching, it is shocking to hear ancient preachers like John Chrysostom saying things like
Do you wish to honor the body of Christ? Do not allow it to be despised in its members, that is, in the poor, who have no clothes to cover themselves. Do not honor Christ’s body here in church with silk fabrics, while outside you neglect it when it suffers from cold and nakedness.
Statements like these have been repeated throughout Church history, and often today get associated with more radical figures. But that’s largely our problem: statements such as Chrysostom’s are shocking until you remember that the book of James reads
Your gold and silver have rusted and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.
Leo recounts the endless teachings on this very clear point, but not everyone was crazy about this being his first writing. No small number have complained online about having hoped for a Pope who was going to address the moto proprio about the Latin Mass, or perhaps someone who would tamp down the movement of synodality. These things remain to be addressed, but what is very clear is that Leo’s priority is for the Church and her witness in a morally complex world.
While much of the document covers familiar ground, there is a very intriguing line which he opens up that I want to explore. The intriguing addition by Leo to this very familiar territory comes in his framing of love of the poor not just as an act of mercy—something God does but which is just something God does—and makes poverty metaphysically significant—something about who God is and how reality itself is structured.
The document opens, for example, recounting not the words of Jesus in Matthew 25—which would emphasize care for the poor as a command or as that which is tied into judgment at the end of all things. Leo begins with a vision of Jesus revealing the world to turn on the a reversal of the powerful and the powerless, the poor and the rich. He begins by quoting from Mary’s Magnificat, in which Mary prays for the powerful to be thrown down, and follows it up with Jesus’ own affirmation of the churches of the future in Revelation 3:9
You have but little power…I will make them come and bow down before your feet.
By beginning with two statements about who God is in relation to poverty, and not what people are commanded to do, Leo immediately signals to the reader that, when we are looking at the poor, we are not looking at a moral command, even if the care for the poor does bear the weight of a command. What we are dealing with in how we love the poor is an image of who God is, Matthew 25 at its most direct and least analogical.
This point becomes more clear in the way that Leo describes the incarnation of Christ:
The Old Testament history of God’s preferential love for the poor and readiness to hear their cry—to which I have briefly alluded—comes to fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth. By his Incarnation, he “emptied himself, takin the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, and in that form he brought us salvation. His was a radical poverty, grounded in his mission to reveal fully God’s love for us.
Poverty here is no accidental feature of the incarnation, that the God who exercises preferential treatment for the poor appears as the poor: God exercises care in this way because this is intrinsic to the nature of God, which is love.
The implications are pretty profound here: that the knowledge and encounter of God does not accommodate itself to us in the form of poverty, as if poverty were accidental to God’s revelation. Rather, poverty reveals by analogy something of God’s own essential nature. When we consider that this is explicitly written as a sequel to Pope Francis I’s last encyclical, Dilexit Nos, the full picture comes into view.
On the surface, an exhortation about God’s love for the poor seems a curious followup to Dilexit Nos. Toward the end of his papacy, Francis released an encyclical entitled Delixit Nos: On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ.
Compared with his better known Laudato Si or Fratelli Tutti—both of which garnered a lot of attention from supporters and critics—Dilexit Nos is a more straight-down-the-middle kind of document, emphasizing that, in Christ, the love of God and human love are knit together. But the connection between these documents is clear: the love of God for the world (Laudato) and the love which people have for one another (Fratelli) originates with what it means for God’s love to be in Christ, and be known to us.
Love, Francis writes, unites fragments, drawing together opposites into a singular whole.
Likewise, Christ’s heart, which reveals God’s love and what humans are meant to be, unites: to enter into God’s own love, we must enter into it through its human face. We are led into the love of God by sensible things, Francis writes, that we learn of the love of God by material signs of that love, that this is the way into the union of the divine and human in Christ, to be joined to God’s own love through this human person Jesus.
The turn—and the connection to Delixi Te—comes at the end, where having described the contemplative nature of entering into God’s love, Francis invokes the love of the poor as the manifestation of this contemplative love
We need to remember that in the Roman Empire many of the poor, foreigners, and others who lived ont he fringes of society met with respect, affection, and care from Christians…by associating with the lowest ranks of society, “Jesus brought the great novelty of recognizing the dignity of very person, especially those who were considered unworthy. This new principle in human history—which emphasizes that individuals are even more ‘worthy’ of our respect and love when they are weak, scorend and suffering, even to the point of losing the human figure—has changed the world.
This turn by Dilexit Nos deliberately sidesteps some of the more obvious places that writings on contemplative love tend to go— liturgical piety, practices of prayer, Marian devotion—and connects the love of God with the wretched of the earth. By foregrounding his work with Dilexit Nos—this treatise on entering into the heart of Jesus—Leo XIV revolutionizes the love of the poor from a command to how God is revealed.
For to enter into the dual love of Jesus just is to enter into the love of the poor. The revolutionary solidarity, not just of the people of God with the poor, but of God’s own nature with the poor, makes the call to prioritize the poor a call to do nothing less than to love God’s own heart. This is, it goes without saying, not to negate prayer, but rather to say that if a church which calls itself lovers of God does not pray with the very image of God, woe be unto it, and beware that it is praying to a god made in its own image.