A Pope Who Wrote the Poor into the Center
When the Vatican released Dilexi Te — “I have loved you” — the pressroom hummed with the kind of quiet attention usually reserved for a rare, decisive pivot. At 104 pages and five chapters, the new apostolic exhortation from Pope Leo XIV is lean by Vatican standards, yet it lands like a deliberate stone thrown into a still pond: ripples everywhere.
“This is not a pamphlet,” a veteran Vatican correspondent told me over espresso, fingers steepled. “It is a map.”
Pope Leo, a pontiff who spent large stretches of his pastoral life in Peru’s neighborhoods and feeding centers, has chosen poverty as the lens through which his early papacy will be judged. He inherited and extended a line of thought begun by Pope Francis — a theology that refuses to separate divine love from the lived condition of the poor — but he did not merely echo. He reshaped, broadened and sharpened the challenge.
What Dilexi Te Actually Says
The document opens with an intimate declaration. “I am happy to make this document my own,” the pope writes, “adding some reflections — and to issue it at the beginning of my own pontificate.” There is a pastoral cadence here: not a manifesto, not a treatise, but a pastoral teaching designed to be applied.
At its heart, Dilexi Te argues that poverty wears many faces. It names the obvious — material destitution, those who lack the daily means to survive — and then moves to the subtler, sometimes more corrosive varieties: social marginalization, lack of voice, cultural and spiritual impoverishment. It warns of new forms of deprivation that technology, global markets and political neglect can create.
“Society needs to be cured of a sickness which is weakening and frustrating it,” Pope Leo writes, “and which can only lead to new crises.” The language is urgent. The prescription is structural: changes to market rules, redistribution of opportunity, the reimagining of systems that have left many living paycheck to paycheck.
Clear Calls, Quiet Radicalism
The exhortation is not an economic blueprint in technical detail, but it is nevertheless clear in its priorities. It asks policymakers, business leaders and ordinary citizens to recognize the dignity and agency of people trapped at the margins. It urges reform of global market mechanisms that concentrate wealth while producing insecurity for most.
“We cannot reduce the Gospel to a set of personal pieties,” said a senior synod delegate who read drafts of the text. “Prayer is vital — but so is justice.”
Voices from the Streets of Lima and Beyond
In a small market outside Lima, where Pope Leo once spent half his time listening and serving, María, a ceviche vendor in her sixties, pressed my hand. “He came and sat with us,” she recalled. “He didn’t just bless the food. He asked where we sleep, how our children go to school. He knows what it feels like to wait.”
Father Alvarez, who runs a soup kitchen in the city’s outlying district, laughed softly when I asked what the new document means on the ground. “It gives us language,” he said. “We feed, yes — but he reminds us to name why they are hungry. It’s not enough to hand out bread without asking what broke the baker’s oven.”
That is the poetic bluntness of Dilexi Te: compassion sharpened into critique. The pope’s insistence that poverty is both moral and structural draws out a coalition of activists, clergy and residents who have long argued that charity without justice is insufficient.
Numbers That Illuminate the Crisis
Numbers, always useful to frame urgency: the World Bank’s international extreme poverty line sits at $2.15 a day; estimates in the years since the pandemic put the number of people living at or below that line in the several hundreds of millions. Many more are technically above the line yet live precariously — one illness, one job loss away from destitution.
In richer countries the face of the crisis is different but no less stark. A late-2023 survey in the United States found that nearly half of Americans would struggle to cover an unexpected $400 expense. In other words: economic insecurity is not simply a problem of distance on a map. It is often a problem of policy and choice.
Global inequality, meanwhile, has widened across recent decades. Cities gleam with skyscrapers while informal settlements creep up their flanks. The pope’s document asks us to see the costs of that contrast as moral as well as economic.
What Reform Looks Like — And Who Will Resist
Dilexi Te asks for systemic change: rethinking trade rules, tax systems, labor protections, and corporate responsibilities. It is a call to anchor markets to human dignity rather than to efficiency alone.
Not everyone welcomed the prescription. “We should not demonize market mechanisms,” said a market economist, Dr. Lina Chen, during a panel discussion. “Markets lift people out of poverty when paired with smart regulation. The trick is design. Shock doctrine and heavy-handed policy together can make the poor worse off.”
Even so, Pope Leo’s critique carries weight because it is pastoral before it is political. It raises a moral question to policymakers and CEOs alike: whom do our systems serve?
- Calls in the document: greater economic inclusion, protections for precarious workers, and policies to reverse exclusion.
- A warning against economic rules that enrich a few while deepening inequality.
- An appeal for dignity in therapy: not merely charity but rights, voice and participation.
Why This Matters Beyond the Basilica
How we respond to poverty says something about our shared future. Will we build economies where billions simply hang on by a thread — or will we try to knit safety nets, robust public services and equitable access to opportunity? The pope’s exhortation reframes the conversation as existential: the sustainability of societies depends on their capacity to include.
“The theological point is simple,” said a university ethicist. “Love that is not incarnate among the poor is abstract. When a leader of the Church names structural sin, it elevates conversations in parliaments, boardrooms and community halls.”
For many Catholics and non-Catholics alike, Dilexi Te will be less about doctrinal novelty and more about moral insistence. It insists that religious love has public consequences — practical, fiscal and political.
What Comes Next?
Pope Leo has issued a direction, not a timetable. Implementation will depend on bishops, local communities, NGOs and secular institutions taking up the themes and applying them in their contexts. That is a tall order. But as one community organizer in Lima put it, “Words matter when they are lived. We want the help, but we also want to be heard.”
So where do you stand in this story? Do you believe markets can be remade to serve the many, not just the few? Can love — even the kind named in a papal exhortation — be translated into policy? The document, for all its pastoral warmth, amounts to a dare.
Dilexi Te invites us into a debate that is theological, political and eminently human. Whether you worship in a cathedral or simply worry about your neighbor, its message is the same: poverty is not an inevitability to accept quietly. It is a wound to be tended — urgently, creatively and together.
