'I Love Them, Lord, But Do I Love Them Like You?': Wrestling With Dilexi Te
- Guest Contributor
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
Pope Leo XIV's first exhortation reminds us that the poor are not a problem to fix, but persons to love — and that every act of service begins with conversion of heart.
By Philip Couture
Director of Formation
There’s a question that has defined all my years in Denver:
“How do I serve the poor?”
That’s probably not the question that follows most people through the Mile High City, but it marked my very first days here up to the present. In 2014, I was living in the Andes Mountains of Peru seeking to serve the poorest population I knew. Then God called me to Denver to serve on staff with Christ in the City, which consists of college-aged missionaries who receive Catholic formation and seek to befriend those living on the streets.
I have been asked by others how to best serve the poor more times than I can count. Given my work, people are often curious about my perspective. What I usually withhold from my answer is that I keep asking myself the same question. Though so much of my life revolves around love for the homeless in Denver, I often wonder if I love them as Christ loves them.
When I learned Pope Leo XIV intended to release Dilexi te, I could not help but feel invested. An American pope who lived in Peru writing about the Christian call to love the poor… I don’t know if anyone could speak more powerfully to my experience than this man, and I read the document eagerly hoping that he would.
But Dilexi te did not ease my concerns about loving the poor. If anything, it stimulated even more earnestness.
Pope Leo’s document is an Apostolic Exhortation. It is not so much intended to expand on Church teaching, but rather to encourage us to live out the Christian life in a certain way. The message is loud and clear: You cannot be a follower of Christ without loving the poor.
The choice to forego expanding on Church teaching regarding service to the poor seems to teach something in itself. Without getting stuck in the weeds, Pope Leo highlights the wisdom of the Scriptures, Church history, the saints, religious communities and Catholic Social Teaching.
In every time and every circumstance, no Christian of any spirituality can renounce the call to love the poor. While the Church is always able to deepen in Christ’s teaching for us, his teaching regarding the poor is as straightforward as it is challenging. At one point, Pope Leo seems to muse out loud: “I often wonder, even though the teaching of Sacred Scripture is so clear about the poor, why many people continue to think they can safely disregard the poor” (23). He later borrows from the words of Pope Francis to make the same point: “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’” (31).
Why is it so essential to love the poor? Because to love the poor is to love as God loves. God manifests a persistent preoccupation for those who are most vulnerable throughout the Old Testament. His partiality to the poor is so intense that, when the Son chose to dwell among us, he took on all the vulnerable features of those his Sacred Heart burned to love: born among animals, his life threatened, his childhood in exile, his youth hidden by poverty (19-20). In Pope Leo’s words, “His was a radical poverty, grounded in his mission to reveal fully God’s love for us” (18). Jesus’ Incarnation reveals a love that is willing to be stripped of everything for the sake of those he loves.
When we choose to love the poor, we choose to love as God loves. When we seek to provide for their needs out of love, we place ourselves in direct contact with divine love. “It is,” as Pope Leo asserts, “the ordinary path to conversion for those who wish to follow Christ with an undivided heart” (46).
We face so many obstacles to living out this love. The first obstacles are in our own heart, and the rest are in those environments that structure our lives.
Our hearts are often hardened to the poor, and we find many reasons for that hardness of heart. When encountering someone in these vulnerable circumstances, we often echo Jesus’ disciples when noticing a man who was born blind. They asked, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2) With the homeless, I have often heard this in other ways: “Were they just unlucky? Are they just lazy? Are they just addicts or mentally ill?”
Pope Leo confronts these notions head-on with a jarring assertion: “The poor are not there by chance or by blind and cruel fate. Nor, for most of them, is poverty a choice. Yet, there are those who still presume to make this claim, thus revealing their own blindness and cruelty” (14).
Pope Leo is not naïve to the complexities of poverty. He acknowledges that, while some remain poor who work “dawn to dusk,” there are those also who feel trapped by the situation they inherited and cave to their despair (14). His point is that poverty is not the result of some nebulous force, like luck, nor do people just enjoy deprivation. If poverty exists, it is because of the world’s lack of love.
In Christ in the City, I have seen all these complexities among my many friends from the streets. Many describe “unlucky” circumstances leading them to the streets, and others insist they chose this life of poverty. Though their own testimony seems to contradict the Holy Father, I know one thing for sure: Nobody ends up on the streets who 1) has somebody who cares about them and 2) believes they are worth being cared for. In general, anyone on the streets is there either because they do not believe they are worthy of good things or because other people do not believe it for them. As we say at Christ in the City, the innumerous stories of poverty and homelessness have one constant: ruptured relationships. Pope Leo’s rally cry is that we Christians choose to be those loving relationships the poor desperately need.
Sadly, some of these ruptures can infiltrate the structures that we take for granted. Organizations and governments reflect the hearts that build them, and Pope Leo calls for us to be critical of how these structures perpetuate hardness of heart towards the poor. An American himself, he seems to direct himself to our country, warning us of adopting notions that “a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty” (114). The answer to poverty is not the economy. Despite the importance of perfecting structures, none of them could ever suffice. The only answer to poverty is the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and Pope Leo is exhorting us to adopt this heart in every arena.
So, what are we to do? Once again, Pope Leo is utterly uncomplicated in his answer. All we have to do is find the vulnerable among us. He reminds us of Jesus’ exhortation to care for the sick and imprisoned because whatever we do for these, we do for Christ (Matthew 25). He praises the saintly efforts of those who prioritize impoverished communities and migrants, whose services are fruitless without love. Do we find ourselves serving among the Christians he names?
In the end, I have the answer to my aching question: How do I serve the poor? I love them! I love them enough to do something for them! And that is a share in the Heart of Christ.
