Dr Nicolete Burbach from the Heythrop Institute shares her reflections on Dilexi Te.
“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. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter” ([James] 5:3-5). (Dilexi te, no. 30)
This is striking to read. Critiques of inequality are far from alien to Catholic teaching, but they are generally put in somewhat more conciliatory, unspecific language than this. Consolidating the impact, Leo then follows this passage with an explicit rejection of attempts to soften it:
The message of God’s word is “so clear and direct, so simple and eloquent, that no ecclesial interpretation has the right to relativize it. The Church’s reflection on these texts ought not to obscure or weaken their force, but urge us to accept their exhortations with courage and zeal… Conceptual tools exist to heighten contact with the realities they seek to explain, not to distance us from them.” (Dilexi te, no. 31)
Here, Leo quotes Pope Francis’ Evangelii Gaudium no. 194. This passage originally follows a much less harsh encouragement to be merciful, especially by giving alms. Leo’s use of the passage from Evangelii Gaudium suggests that this principle of directness is less consoling than Francis himself recognises.
Unconsoling politics
More subtly, this contrast in approaches to consolation is also present in the two documents’ respective appeals to “realities”. In Evangelii Gaudium no. 231, Francis proposes the principle, “realities are greater than ideas”; a principle evoked by the language of “conceptual tools” and “realities” in the passage quoted by Leo.
This principle enjoins us to hold both concrete realities and idealisations in a productive tension, in which ideas illuminate reality and enable us to envisage agency and how the world might be, while reality prevents ideas from becoming alienated from the world.
Massimo Borghesi reads this principle as part of an attempt to think in a ‘multipolar’ way that refuses to resolve dialectics, instead embracing productive tension. The ideal and the real is a key dialectic for Francis, ensuring that thought can transcend pure subjectivity to engage with a reality independent of human experience (1).
In his 2011 text, “We as Citizens, We as People”, Francis frames this idea as protecting thought from becoming closed in on itself, pretending to an absolute totality that enables it to ignore the world (2). This means rejecting politics that revolve around this pretended totality.
Borghesi suggests that Francis also works out this idea in his 1989 lecture, “On the Need for a Political Anthropology”.
This lecture includes examples of these politics, including those premised on systems of thought that, ironically, emphasise realities over ideas to the point that the agency of the human person is lost. For example, Francis rejects structuralist social theories founded on the prioritisation of impersonal structures over human agency, along with metaphysics that reduce away moral value, leaving only physical laws and the exercise of technical power (3).
In this context, Francis’ principle has an affective function: it consoles the Church in the face of the challenges of modernity. It does so by naming contested aspects of its teachings as ‘realities’: a performative (in the philosophical sense of meaning-making) gesture that affirms the Church’s value in the face of political challenges.
For example, when he dismisses impersonal structuralism, Francis is thinking of Marxism (4). Asserting a productive tension between structures and the person as a ‘reality’ affirms the significance of Catholic anthropology as the system of thought in contact with this ‘reality’, against the Marxist intellectual framework and the critiques it brings.
Likewise, Catholic critiques of queerness (and particularly transness) (5) often (mis)represent it as the overreach of technological power (6). In this context, asserting the ‘reality’ of productive tension between moral value and worldly power affirms the importance of moral realism - or more specifically, Catholic moral realist ethics - in the face of queer and feminist critique.
This too contrasts with Dilexi te. Leo’s alignment of the most forceful passages of James with ‘realities’ speaks unambiguously against the capitalism historically defended by the Church against Marxism (albeit with reformist qualifications) (7). Moreover, it does so alongside explicit concern about structural injustice, and cites Francis in ways that can be read as signalling approval of popular anticapitalism (Dilexi te no. 81).
In doing so, it undermines the consoling performance of affirmation bound up in the anticommunist dimensions of Francis’ principle – to the alarm of more politically conservative commentators.
A less consoling style
In short, Dilexi te suggests a greater openness on Leo’s part to a less consoling style of Catholicism: one that foregoes softened critique and reassuring affirmations in favour of more forceful statements. In this way, it presents a discontinuity between Leo and Francis.
Yet this refusal of consolation is also directed at the Church itself, evoking the way that Francis’ papacy likewise challenged many of the Church’s comforts and complacencies (8). In this sense, rather than a discontinuity, Dilexi te might be read as a harsher rearticulation of the Francis project.
References
(1) Massimo Borghesi, The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Mario Bergolgio’s Intellectual Journey, trans. Barry Hudock (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press Academic, 2018), 121.
(2) Borghesi 2018: 122.
(3) Borghesi 2018: 124-125.
(4) Borghesi 2018: 124.
(5) e.g. Laudato si’ no. 155; Dignitas Infinita no. 55-60
(6) Nicolete Burbach, ‘Editorial: Notes on ‘The Church and “Gender Theory”’’, The Heythrop Journal 66 (2025) 331-340, 334.
(7) e.g. Rerum Novarum no. 20
(8) e.g. Gaudete et exsultate, no. 35-62.