Pope Leo XIV greets visitors after celebrating Mass in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican Oct. 9, 2025. Credit: CNS photo/Vatican Media

“I have loved you.” The apostolic exhortation “Dilexi Te” begins with this simple declaration of love from the Book of Revelation. As he begins, Pope Leo XIV places this exhortation in continuity with the meditation on the divine love expressed in the Sacred Heart of Jesus in “Dilexit Nos,” Pope Francis’ final encyclical. As has become common practice, Pope Leo chose to continue the work begun by his predecessor. “I am happy to make this document my own,” he wrote, affirming his desire “that all Christians come to appreciate the close connection between Christ’s love and his summons to care for the poor” (No. 3). In this exhortation, we hear the voice of a patient teacher reminding us of an inescapable truth at the very heart of Christianity: Christ’s radical love for and identification with the poor. 

At the Oct. 9 press conference at the Vatican introducing “Dilexi Te,” Cardinal Michael Czerny was asked why Pope Leo chose to issue an apostolic exhortation rather than an encyclical. An exhortation, Cardinal Czerny contended, allowed the pope to focus on a particular topic, whereas encyclicals are expected to be broader in scope. Additionally, within Catholic social teaching, encyclicals have the added expectation of a wider audience—they directly seek to engage both the faithful and all people of good will. 

If we compare Pope Francis’s first apostolic exhortation, “Evangelii Gaudium,” with the encyclicals “Laudato Si’” or “Fratelli Tutti,” we can see the difference in focus and audience. “Dilexi Te” invites the faithful to deepen their relationship with Christ through concern for the poor. To turn away from the poor is to “turn away from the very heart of God” (No. 8).

The language of “Dilexi Te” is incarnational and personal. It is in the “wounded faces of the poor” that we encounter or reject the face of Christ. As with Pope Francis, for Pope Leo the question of encounter is not abstract or ideological—it is physical and human. As the good Samaritan meets the wounded man on the side of the road, so too we are called to recognize Christ in the faces of our neighbor. “At the same time,” he notes, “we should perhaps speak more correctly of the many faces of the poor and of poverty, since it is a multifaceted phenomenon” (No. 9). In Scripture, we see Jesus “experienced the same exclusion that is the lot of the poor, the outcast of society,” Leo explains. “He presented himself to the world not only as a poor Messiah, but also as the Messiah of and for the poor” (No. 19). Love for the poor must be lived as a constitutive element of love of Christ.

For Pope Francis, “A faith which does not draw us into solidarity is a faith without Christ, it is a faith without God, faith without brothers and sisters.” A hallmark of Pope Francis’ theology of solidarity was the integration of preaching and practice. In the Gospels, Jesus lived in solidarity with the poor, and it is in the face of the poor person that we meet the face of Christ today. 

Regularly, Francis’s most poignant messages about Christ’s love of the poor were accompanied by his own meetings with those on the margins. One cannot help but see the same reaffirmation of this unity amidst Pope Leo’s celebration of the Jubilee for Migrants and Refugees on the same day he signed “Dilexi Te.” 

In 2022, I had the privilege of meeting with migrants and refugees in El Paso and Juarez as part of the “Doing Theology from the Existential Peripheries” project. Amid poverty and uncertainty, their resilience was a profound act of hope and often accompanied with a deep belief that God was there with them. They actively insisted upon their own dignity despite every social, economic and political structure emphasizing that they are, in the words of “Dilexi Te,” “those who have no rights, no space, no freedom” (No. 9). 

As church, Pope Leo writes, we cannot love and serve God unless we are “a place of welcome and justice” (No. 39). From the very first Christian communities, concern for the poor as essential to discipleship is unequivocally clear. From the Acts of the Apostles and St. Lawrence to the preaching of St. John Chrysostom and St. Augustine, “the nascent Church did not separate belief from social action: faith without witness through concrete actions was considered dead” (No. 40). At the same time, the ease with which we seem to forget that care for the poor is “the burning heart of the Church’s mission” appears to me as a strong indictment of today’s status quo (No. 15). 

While the exhortation strongly emphasizes the ongoing duty to care for the poor, it is perhaps too subtle in asking the church, in its members and as an institution, to examine the ways in which Christians have and continue to perpetuate systems of exclusion.  

Moving from the prophetic preaching of the patristics to Catholic social teaching, we see the deep continuity in the focus on justice. The duty to care for the poor is at once personal and structural. As Leo notes, St. John Chrysostom “vehemently denounced excessive wealth connected with indifference for the poor” (No. 42), and woven through the writings of the early church fathers was a strong sense that care for the poor was fundamentally an act of justice—that is, restoring that which was owed. Not only does “Dilexi Te” reiterate Pope Francis’ recent teaching on inequality and economic exclusion as structures of sin, it also explicitly shows the connection with the church’s earliest moral teachings. 

“Charity has the power to change reality;” explains Leo. “It is a genuine force for change in history” (No. 91). However, this change is only possible through sustained advocacy and action on behalf of the common good. Citing Benedict XVI’s encyclical “Caritas in Veritate,” the pope draws our attention to the fact that extreme poverty is the result of a lack of political will, organization and distribution rather than a dearth of resources (No. 88). 

“Dilexi Te” can be read as a personal invitation to action. “All the members of the People of God,” Leo urges, “have a duty to make their voices heard, albeit in different ways, in order to point out and denounce such structural issues, even at the cost of appearing foolish or naïve.” (No. 97). The moral obligation to change reality, to work for justice, belongs to each and every one of us. An important component of this is the recognition that the poor are themselves subjects, dignified agents (Nos. 99-101). 

Though it presents no new doctrine, “Dilexi Te” presents the imperative to love the poor with critical urgency. “Unjust structures need to be recognized and eradicated by the force of good, by changing mindsets but also,” Leo notes, “with the help of science and technology, by developing effective policies for societal change” (No. 97). And it is only by working together, including those most affected as full participants in building the common good, that such social change is possible. 

We know that to proclaim faith in Jesus is to profess belief in a God who “took on a flesh that hungers and thirsts, experiences infirmity and imprisonment” (No. 110). We know Christ is before us in our marginalized and vulnerable neighbor. “Dilexi Te” reminds us of the clear choice before us: Will we welcome or reject him?

Meghan J. Clark is a professor of theology at St. John’s University in New York. She is the author of The Vision of Catholic Social Thought: The Virtue of Solidarity and the Praxis of Human Rights.