“Poverty challenges Christians, but it also challenges all those who have positions of responsibility in society,” Pope Leo said in his homily at St. Peter’s Basilica, on Nov. 16 for the 9th World Day of the Poor, in which he called on all heads of state to care for the poor, the needy and migrants.
“I urge heads of state and the leaders of nations to listen to the cry of the poorest,” the pope said. “There can be no peace without justice,” he added. “The poor remind us of this in many ways, through migration as well as through their cries, which are often stifled by the myth of well-being and progress that does not take everyone into account, and indeed forgets many individuals, leaving them to their fate.”
Leo’s passionate appeal to conscience comes at a time when political leaders in many countries, most visibly the United States, are showing little mercy to migrants, the homeless and the poor.
The Chicago-born pope spent half of his priestly life working among the poor in the diocese of Chicalyo in northwest Peru. He again showed his profound concern for the discarded in this world this week as he celebrated the Jubilee of the Poor.
The Jubilee brought 10,000 poor people, and those who care for them in a myriad of church organizations worldwide, to Rome for a series of events including passing through the Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday. It culminated on Sunday with the Mass at St. Peter’s and a lunch in the Paul VI audience hall for 1,300, including homeless people and migrants, as well as a group of 50 transgender people whom Francis met regularly during his 12-year pontificate. They sat at round tables like the bishops did during the 2023-2024 Synod on Synodality and enjoyed a menu of lasagna, meat and a dessert.
Pope Leo joined them at lunch and in his blessing recalled that Pope Francis had started the World Day of the Poor, inviting a round of applause for his Argentine predecessor. He also thanked the Vincentian Fathers, who are celebrating the 400th anniversary year of their founding, for providing the meal and for giving attendees rucksacks with essential items including food.
Earlier in the week, on Nov. 14, Leo blessed and opened the second medical center for the poor under Bernini’s Colonnade in St. Peter’s Square, which in turn is located under the study window on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace where the pope appears on Sundays to pray the Angelus and greet pilgrims. It sits next to the complex of showers and barber shop for the homeless and poor opened in 2016 at the instruction of the first Jesuit pope, who believed in finding concrete ways to help the poor and restore their dignity. Leo has shown clearly that he is following that same path.
The new medical outpatient center, called the San Martino Clinic, will provide advanced medical assistance to the poor and needy. It is located next to the Mother of Mercy Clinic, which Pope Francis set up in 2018 to provide care to those without documents, money or access to the health care system. That first medical center has provided assistance to more than 100,000 poor and homeless people from 139 countries over the past year.
Today’s Jubilee of the Poor was also the 9th World Day of the Poor. Pope Francis established the day in 2016 to remind all people that the poor are “at the heart of the Gospel” and that to believe in Jesus Christ means to respect and care for the poor. This is expressed clearly in the apostolic exhortation “Dilexi Te,” which, as Leo recalled today during the Angelus, Francis first drafted in the last months of his life—and which Leo said he completed “with joy” and published on Oct. 4.
Francis wanted the World Day of the Poor to be celebrated with real actions in favor of the poor in churches worldwide on this day every year. He established it as a permanent annual event in the church’s liturgical calendar to emphasize that the poor must be integrated into the one community of the church.
That is exactly what happened in St. Peter’s Basilica today at the Mass presided over by Pope Leo and celebrated with cardinals and hundreds of priests involved in work with the poor. Some 10,000 poor people, migrants, and members of the associations and organizations from many countries that assist them were seated in the basilica, including in the seats where usually the ambassadors and other members of the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See are seated at major celebrations.
Speaking in Italian, the Augustinian pope delivered an inspiring and challenging homily in which he sought to encourage the poor people present in the basilica and worldwide that “in the midst of persecution, suffering, struggles and oppression in our personal lives and in society, God does not abandon us. He reveals himself as the one who takes our side,” adding, “in Jesus, his son, God’s closeness reaches the summit of love.”
“On this World Day, the Jubilee of the Poor,” Pope Leo told them, “it is especially to you, dear brothers and sisters, that I want to proclaim the irrevocable words of the Lord Jesus himself: ‘Dilexi te, I have loved you.’ [Rev 3:9]. Yes, before our smallness and poverty, God looks at us like no one else and loves us with eternal love.”
He said that the church, “perhaps especially in our time, still wounded by old and new forms of poverty, hopes to be ‘a mother of the poor, a place of welcome and justice’ [“Dilexi Te,” No. 39].” He noted that “many forms of poverty oppress our world! First and foremost are material forms of poverty, but there are also many moral and spiritual situations of poverty, which often affect young people in a particular way. The tragedy that cuts across them all is loneliness.”
All this, he said, “challenges us to look at poverty in an integral way, because while it is certainly necessary at times to respond to urgent needs, we also must develop a culture of attention, precisely in order to break down the walls of loneliness. Let us, then, be attentive to others, to each person, wherever we are, wherever we live, transmitting this attitude within our families, living it out in the workplace and in academic environments, in different communities, in the digital world, everywhere, reaching out to the marginalized and becoming witnesses of God’s tenderness.”
Addressing all those in the basilica and Christians worldwide, Pope Leo observed that the “scenarios of war, unfortunately present in various regions of the world today, seem especially to confirm that we are in a state of helplessness.” But, he said, “the globalization of helplessness arises from a lie, from believing that history has always been this way and cannot change. The Gospel, on the other hand, reminds us that it is precisely in the upheavals of history that the Lord comes to save us. And so today, as a Christian community, together with the poor, we must become a living sign of this salvation.”
He expressed his personal thanks to the charity workers, volunteers and those who seek to alleviate the conditions of the poorest for the work they are doing, and he encouraged them “to continue to be the critical conscience of society.”
Leo reminded those present and all believers that “the question of the poor leads back to the essence of our faith, for they are the very flesh of Christ and not just a sociological category [“Dilexi Te,” No. 110].” He added, “This is why, ‘the Church, like a mother, accompanies those who are walking. Where the world sees threats, she sees children; where walls are built, she builds bridges’ [“Dilexi Te,” No. 75].” He concluded by calling on all believers, “Let us all join together in this commitment!”
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