A woman and child attended Pope Francis’ Mass for the World Day of the Poor Nov. 17 in St. Peter’s Basilica. (Vatican Media / CNS / 2024)

By Gina Christian
OSV News

In his first apostolic exhortation, Pope Leo XIV has taken up the call of Pope Francis for Christians to see in the poor the very face of Christ — and to be a church that “walks poor with the poor” in order to authentically live out the Gospel.

“Dilexi Te” (“I Have Loved You”) was publicly released Oct. 9, having been signed on Oct. 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, whose radical embrace of poverty and service to the poor is presented as a key example in the exhortation.

The document, which spans five chapters, takes its title from Rv. 3:9, in which Christ addresses “a Christian community that, unlike some others, had no influence or resources, and was treated instead with violence and contempt,” wrote Pope Leo.

The exhortation completes one that “Pope Francis was preparing in the last months of his life” — namely, an apostolic exhortation on the church’s care for the poor that built on the late pope’s 2024 encyclical “Dilexit Nos,” said Pope Leo.

“I am happy to make this document my own — adding some reflections — and to issue it at the beginning of my own pontificate, since I share the desire of my beloved predecessor that all Christians come to appreciate the close connection between Christ’s love and his summons to care for the poor,” wrote Pope Leo, who retained Pope Francis’ planned title for the work.

Pope Leo said he, like his predecessor, considered it “essential to insist on this path to holiness,” since — as Pope Francis wrote in his 2018 apostolic exhortation “Gaudete et Exsultate” — “in this call to recognize him in the poor and the suffering, we see revealed the very heart of Christ, his deepest feelings and choices, which every saint seeks to imitate.”

The exhortation draws extensively on Scripture, papal and conciliar documents, the works of the Church Fathers and the lives of numerous saints — as well as the “ecclesial discernment” of the Latin American bishops, to whom Pope Leo said he was “greatly indebted,” having previously served as an Augustinian missionary in Peru for several years.

Throughout the document, Pope Leo urges Christians to recognize God’s oneness with the poor, and to prioritize them according to the demands of faith.

“Love for the Lord … is one with love for the poor,” wrote the pope, observing later in the document that “Jesus’ teaching on the primacy of love for God is clearly complemented by his insistence that one cannot love God without extending one’s love to the poor.”

In an even more direct passage, Pope Leo admitted, “I often wonder, even though the teaching of Sacred Scripture is so clear about the poor, why many people continue to think that they can safely disregard the poor.”

“The poor are not there by chance or by blind and cruel fate. Nor, for most of them, is poverty a choice,” said Pope Leo. “Yet, there are those who still presume to make this claim, thus revealing their own blindness and cruelty.”

He pointed to a culture — one “sometimes well disguised” — that “discards others without even realizing it and tolerates with indifference that millions of people die of hunger or survive in conditions unfit for human beings.”

Christians themselves have not been immune from “attitudes shaped by secular ideologies or political and economic approaches that lead to gross generalizations and mistaken conclusions,” wrote Pope Leo.

“The fact that some dismiss or ridicule charitable works, as if they were an obsession on the part of a few and not the burning heart of the Church’s mission, convinces me of the need to go back and re-read the Gospel, lest we risk replacing it with the wisdom of this world,” he reflected. “The poor cannot be neglected if we are to remain within the great current of the Church’s life that has its source in the Gospel and bears fruit in every time and place.”

The text of the exhortation in English can be found at: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/apost_exhortations/documents/20251004-dilexi-te.html.