CCSTP steering group member Dr Maria Exall shares an overview of Dilexi Te in this blog. She will also be speaking at our free webinar exploring the exhortation on Monday 17 November. Book here.
Pope Leo exhorts us to pursue justice for the poor. Further, Dilexi Te declares that love for the poor is at the cutting edge of contemporary spirituality and central to the renewal of the Church.
Dilexi te starts by quoting Revelation ‘You have but little power….I will make them come and bow down before your feet’ and echoes the Canticle of Mary on casting the mighty from their thrones and raising the lowly. It asserts a moral and political teleology of justice for the poor, the powerless and marginalised.
A Church of the Beatitudes
In chapter 2, the Exhortation explains that in Scripture God chooses the poor. In the Old Testament God is the friend and the liberator of the poor, and in the Gospels Jesus came to bring good news to the poor. We are called to be a Church of the Beatitudes, to become ‘a place where the poor have a privileged place’.
Our love for the poor has to be something real and active. The Apostles explained; how can we say we love God who we cannot see if we ignore or sisters and brothers who we have seen, and say we have faith when we do not have works to show it?
Pope Leo expresses concern about the rise of poverty in poorer areas of the world and growing inequality in wealthier parts of the world. Dilexi Te highlights he treatment of workers who are denied fair wages and the many women who are doubly poor because of exclusion and mistreatment, as well as the situation for migrants, prisoners, those who are sick and those denied an education.
Being weak and poor and marginalised is not a moral failure and it is wrong to treat the poor with violence and contempt, stigmatise or make the poor ashamed. If we do not acknowledge their full human dignity we create a culture where people learn to tolerate the existence of mass poverty and suffering.
The adoption of ‘ideological prejudices’ means that many are indifferent to the cry of the poor. These prejudices include assumptions that the marketplace and financial speculation are separate from ethics, and the belief that wealth will ‘trickle down’ through the actions of unrestrained and invisible market forces. Rather, Dilexi te says economic and social injustice have to be understood as resulting from structural sin. There is an important role for the State to be vigilant for the common good.
The Spirit can transform us through love of the poor so we are freed from ‘living our relationships according to a logic of calculation and self-interest’, and are open to the gratuitousness that surrounds those who love one another. In contrast, an illusion of happiness pushes many people towards a vision of life centred on the accumulation of wealth and social success at all costs, and encourages a ‘specious view of meritocracy that sees only the successful as deserving’.
Witness through charity
In chapter 3, the Exhortation gives numerous examples of Christian witness through charity in the early centuries of our tradition. In chapter 4 it explains the development of the Churches social doctrine in the last two centuries of industrial and technological change.
From 1891 in Pope Leo X111 Rerum Novarum onwards there has been a ‘veritable treasury’ of significant Papal teachings on poverty with new insights in the modern era including on the labour question and on our growing understanding of the mechanisms of global injustice.
Unsurprisingly Pope Leo highlights the preferential option for the poor developed by the Conferences of Latin American Bishops in the second half of the 20th century as significant for the life of the Church as a whole.
With a pertinence for the ‘Christian movements and groups who show little or no interest in the common good of society’ Dilexi te says it is works of mercy are signs of the authenticity of worship. Christianity cannot be restricted to the private sphere. Charitable works may be dismissed or ridiculed by some, but they are the burning heart of the Church.
Love for the poor as a path to holiness
So Dilexi te calls on us to love the poor in a concrete way, but more – to follow this love as a path to holiness. The love for the poor leads us to the inexhaustible mystery of the human and divine heart of Jesus. Our response to their poverty must be an engaged practical humility , a solidarity with those who are humiliated not a paternalism from above. Voluntary poverty as an evangelical virtue is the neighbourliness that is the mysticism of God’s presence in ‘the little ones’.
God’s plan of love unfolds and is fulfilled in history. Hearing the cry of the poor challenges our lives, our societies and the political and economic system and, not least, it challenges the Church, for the poor recognise aspects of reality that others cannot see. They are the very flesh of Christ.
Image credit: By Argentina.gob.ar, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=169417958