Dilexit Te
Pigi Banna - Yesterday, the Apostolic Exhortation “Dilexi Te,” signed on October 4, was published. It is the first magisterial document of Pope Leo XIV.
In his first official document, “Dilexi Te,” Pope Leo chose to adopt and make his own a text begun by Pope Francis “on the Church's care for the poor and with the poor.” This close continuity with his predecessor marks the entire text, not only for the extensive references to Bergoglio's magisterium but also for the shared conviction that the steps taken by the Latin American episcopate over the last twenty years should become a significant milestone for the whole Church.
“Dilexi Te” contains a powerful and disturbing invitation. I believe it will be much talked about, not only in the coming days. One day after its release, I would like to mention just two impressions, drawn from two expressions used in the text to describe the figure of St. Augustine: “Christocentric and deeply ecclesial.”
The text, in fact, continually insists on the inseparability of experiencing Christ's love and the Church's concrete care for the poor: one cannot exist without the other.
The Christocentric Dimension
For Pope Leo, turning our gaze to the poor is the most concrete way to bring attention back to the heart of Christ; hence the continuity with Pope Francis' encyclical Dilexit nos, dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. As described in the biblical excursus within the text, God has always had a preferential option for the poor: in them, He loved the poverty of all humanity, and to save this same humanity, He made himself poor.
Attention to the poor, therefore, belongs not to the realm of sociological analysis, charity, or problems to be solved, but to the realm of Revelation. As St. Francis discovered, in embracing the poor, it is God himself who meets us today with His living presence, a “flesh that is hungry, thirsty, sick, imprisoned.” The reality of the Incarnation must reach this point.
Christians, therefore, do not approach the poor as philanthropists or activists, moving from above to below and treating others as objects of their compassion. Mother Teresa of Calcutta teaches us, the Pope says, that we approach the poor as the bride goes to the Bridegroom: She adores Him, contemplates Him, and identifies with His own heart, to the point of offering and sacrificing herself in the care of a concrete person.
For this reason, every gesture directed toward the poor endures until the last day because it has a nuptial value, in the sense that it consecrates the relationship between the misery of our humanity and the eternal love of God.
The Ecclesial Dimension
For Pope Leo, the Church is clearly the body of Christ in history, fulfilling its deepest vocation “when it kneels beside a leper, an undernourished child, or an anonymous dying person” because it loves “the Lord where He is most disfigured.”
Care for the poor cannot be just the “fixation” of a few but is “the burning core of the Church's mission,” as highlighted by the long historical excursus that occupies the central body of the text: from the early Christian communities to the great stories of congregations and saints who took care of the sick, prisoners, the education of the poor, and the welcoming of migrants.
Pope Leo XIV in the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls. (ANSA 2025, Angelo Carconi)
For Pope Leo, giving priority to the presence of the poor, even at the institutional level, is more urgent than ever for the renewal of the Church, precisely to bring it out of the shallows of self-referentiality, “doctrinal rigor without mercy,” worldliness, and the exhausting search for enemies to fight. These are viruses to which the ecclesial body is exposed in the face of the current epochal change.
It is precisely at this time that the Church can rediscover that she is the bride of the Lord, but only when she becomes the sister of the poor; she can show herself to be a welcoming mother, but only when she recognizes that “in every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself who knocks on the doors of the community”; and she can reveal herself as the light of the world, but “only when it strips itself of everything, [... because] holiness passes through a humble heart devoted to the least.”
Therefore, when the Church bends down to serve the poor, it assumes its highest posture, which reveals its identity: it is the body and bride of Christ, mother and saint, the light of the world.
Precisely on this necessary ecclesial renewal, the meek and balanced Pope Leo is not afraid to use clear and disruptive tones. On the one hand, he thanks those who not only visit the poor but have chosen to live among them. On the other hand, he does not fail to admit that we Christians “have grown in many ways, but we are illiterate in accompanying, caring for, and supporting the most fragile and weakest in our developed societies. We have become accustomed to looking away, passing by, ignoring situations until they directly affect us.”
Instead, we must have the courage to denounce structures of injustice for the integral promotion of the human being: “it is the task of all members of the People of God to make their voices heard, in different ways, to awaken, to denounce, to expose themselves even at the cost of appearing ‘stupid.’”
The Pope points a finger at the indifference and elitism of some Christian movements and groups that only care for the wealthy, ignore the poor, reduce Christianity to the intimacy of their own private sphere, and inevitably run the risk of dissolution. What community can claim to be exempt from this risk?
Approaching the Living Christ
Not for the sake of moralism, but to return to Christ and to the true identity of the Church, the Pope suggests his way forward—caring for the poor—starting with a very simple first gesture: almsgiving, to which he dedicates the last lines of his writing. Those who approach the poor as if they were approaching the living Christ will experience that “charity is a force that changes reality, an authentic historical power of change.” It can change history because it changes the human heart.
From the perspective of their marginalization, the poor open up new perspectives, disarm aggressive pride, bring us back to the fundamental precariousness of life, and simplify it. In this, human beings rediscover that they are objects of Christ's mercy and are called to be transparent signs of His presence in the world.
This is the path that changed Robert Prevost's life, as he confesses when speaking of his missionary experience in Peru. He, as Leo XIV, proposes it again to the Church. Every Christian today is offered the opportunity to verify it.
