The Ecclesial Vision of Dilexi Te

I’ve heard a lot of commentary in the past week about Pope Leo XIV’s Apostolic Exhortation, Dilexi Te. This isn’t surprising, Dilexi Te is Pope Leo’s first major teaching document, and there are many people, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, who are anxious to get a sense of who Leo is and what his papal priorities will be.

Some of the commentary has praised the pope for speaking out on behalf of the poor and marginalized and some have pushed back against Leo for being too woke or liberal. However, all of the commentary I’ve read has seen Dilexi Te as primarily, or exclusively, a moral exhortation for Christians to better serve the poor. While this isn’t untrue, I don’t think it’s a wholly accurate description of this document.

As a moral exhortation for Christians to prioritize the poor, both individually and structurally, Dilexi Te doesn’t say much that’s new. Anyone familiar with the Church’s social teaching, and specifically the teaching of Pope Francis, will find this document familiar. But Dilexi Te is much more than a reiteration of the Church’s moral teaching about poverty. It’s a call to significantly shift how we understand ourselves as the People of God, our relationship to the poor, and our mission in the world.

In Dilexi Te, Pope Leo lays out a systematic theology not only grounded in the teaching of Vatican II, but specifically in the interpretation and lived reality of the council in the Latin American Church. Leo, explicitly picking up on Pope Francis’s emphasis on the theology that came out of the post-councilar episcopal conferences in Latin American, said, “The Conferences of the Latin American Bishops held in Medellín, Puebla, Santo Domingo and Aparecida were…significant events for the life of the Church as a whole” (DT 89). Leo then spends thirteen paragraphs—over 10% of the entire document—presenting multiple theological ideas that came from these conferences.

The specific doctrine that Pope Leo highlights throughout the document, really that shapes the entire exhortation, is perhaps Latin America’s most well known theological contribution to the Universal Church: the preferential option for the poor.

Pope Leo says that the “preferential option on the part of God for the poor” is “an expression that arose in the context of the Latin American continent” and that “has been well integrated into subsequent teachings of the Church” (DT 16). Pope Saint John Paul II eventually “consolidated” this expression into a doctrine (DT 87).

However, the preferential option for the poor isn’t only a moral teaching, it’s a theological statement about God’s identity and the mission of the Church. Leo states that the preferential option for the poor “is a source of extraordinary renewal both for the Church and for society” (DT 7), and later in the document he says “one of the priorities of every movement of renewal within the Church has always been a preferential concern for the poor” (DT 103).

Breaking open this doctrine, Pope Leo quotes the bishops at Medellín:

“Christ our Savior not only loved the poor, but, ‘being rich, he became poor.’ He lived a life of poverty, focused his mission on preaching their liberation, and founded his Church as a sign of this poverty in our midst…The poverty endured by so many of our brothers and sisters cries out for justice, solidarity, witness, commitment and efforts directed to ending it, so that the saving mission entrusted by Christ may be fully accomplished” (DT 90).

For the bulk of Dilexi Te, Pope Leo surveys Scripture, the Church Fathers, centuries of Saintly witnesses, the Church’s body of social teaching, Vatican II, and post-councilar papal documents to demonstrate that the character of God and the nature of the Church expressed in the preferential option for the poor is the Church’s perennial—Traditional—teaching.

In this theology, God isn’t a judge demanding that the debt of humanity’s sin be paid, such that Christ has to appease or protect us from an angry father. Not at all. Rather, “God is merciful love” (DT 16), a Father “who is always concerned for the needs of his children, especially those in greatest need” (DT 8). God is a liberator, who looks at humanity with “a merciful gaze and a heart full of love” and desires to “free us from slavery, fear, sin and the power of death” (DT 16). Pope Leo says:

“Precisely in order to share the limitations and fragility of our human nature, he himself became poor and was born in the flesh like us. We came to know him in the smallness of a child laid in a manger and in the extreme humiliation of the cross, where he shared our radical poverty, which is death” (DT 16).

Christ, Leo goes on to say, “reveals himself as the One who, in the here and now of history, comes to bring about God’s loving closeness, which is above all a work of liberation for those who are prisoners of evil, and for the weak and the poor” (DT 21). And from this revelation of God, Leo expresses the identity and mission of the Church:

“Wanting to inaugurate a kingdom of justice, fraternity and solidarity, God has a special place in his heart for those who are discriminated against and oppressed, and he asks us, his Church, to make a decisive and radical choice in favor of the weakest” (DT 16).

And here, in this understanding of God and the Church—shaped by Vatican II and Latin America, and rooted in the preferential option for the poor—is where Dilexi Te says something new and provocative, at least to the ears of American Catholics.

Leo proclaims that “since apostolic times, the Church has seen the liberation of the oppressed as a sign of the Kingdom of God” (DT 59) and “the mission of the Church, when she is faithful to her Lord, is at all times to proclaim liberation” (DT 61).

The Church needs to be “simpler and more sober,” rejecting “worldly powers” and “more closely resembling her Lord” (DT 84) who “became poor, and was always close to the poor and the outcast” (DT 111). A Church that does not only see the poor and marginalized as “just people to be helped” but “the sacramental presence of the Lord” (DT 44).

Pope Leo is calling the Church to embrace the preferential option for the poor, not by wrestling for spaces in the halls of political power, but by identifying with the most marginalized in our society. Dilexi Te is a prophetic call for the Church to stop getting defensive when the world mocks us, but to spend our energy defending the basic human rights of migrants. It’s a call to stop using the pretense of religious liberty to protect clerics and mistreat lay employees. It’s a call for our parishes and schools to be radically inclusive (cf. DT 72, 99), not fortresses of purity and self-protection. It’s a call to stop hiding behind lawyers to shield ourselves from lawsuits, acting as if abuse survivors were enemies and not the sacramental presence of Christ.

In Dilexi Te, in his own way, Pope Leo XIV picks up the mantle of Pope Francis and says, without any doubt, that we must be a poor Church for the poor. He is calling for us to be a Church without enemies. “The Church that the world needs today,” Leo proclaims, is “a Church that sets no limits to love, that knows no enemies to fight but only men and women to love” (DT 120).