How Much Does Dilexi Te Reflect Leo XIV’s Thinking?
First Things, 20 October 2025
Dilexi Te is clearly a Francis document that Leo has 'made his own.' How much it reflects his own approach remains to be seen.
Slogans do not lift people out of poverty,” Pope Leo XIV said in his address to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, exactly a week after his first major document was released. Dilexi Te (I Have Loved You) is an apostolic exhortation “on love for the poor.”
What does lift people out of poverty? That is not a question the Christian tradition really asks, and neither does the Holy Father in Dilexi Te, a document much more in the line of Pope Francis than Pope Leo XIII, after whom Leo XIV chose his regnal name. Indeed, Dilexi Te is clearly a Francis document that Leo has “made his own.” How much it reflects his own approach remains to be seen.
This is the third time that a new pope has issued as his first document a draft left by his predecessor. When St. John Paul the Great died in 2005, a draft encyclical on charity was underway. Pope Benedict XVI took that in hand and made it the second part of Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), his first encyclical, for which he wrote a lengthy first part on the mystery of Trinitarian love made incarnate in Jesus Christ.
In 2013, at the time of his abdication, Benedict had completed a draft of an encyclical on faith, the final part of his magisterial triptych on the theological virtues. Francis published that as his first encyclical, Lumen Fidei (Light of Faith), with only minor adjustments. Unlike Deus Caritas Est, Lumen Fidei had no impact on the pontificate. Only with the publication of Evangelii Gaudiumlater in 2013 did Francis’s agenda become clear.
It seems that Dilexi Te is more like the latter example than the former. It is very much a Francis encyclical, featuring his typical willingness to enter into statistical policy analysis, as he did in Laudate Deum, an exhortation on climate change. It was signed on October 4, 2023, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. Dilexi Te was also signed on October 4. The clearest indication that it is not Leo XIV’s work is that it mentions Leo XIII only once in passing and has no citations of his teaching.
Leo XIII is the father of Catholic social teaching on economics, politics, and culture, and each successive pope had to decide how much of Leo’s originality to embrace. Most praise him with their lips, but their magisterial hearts lie elsewhere. “It is possible to speak of two paths the magisterium has taken on economic questions since Leo [XIII],” I wrote in these pages upon the election of Leo XIV.
There is the liberty path, in which the plight of workers is to be relieved by expanding the scope of their economic liberty, their agency and creativity. It is rooted in a view that man’s greatest creative resource is himself. . . . The poor, in Leo’s vision, have the creative and productive capacity to escape poverty; it is the obligation of the political and economic system to foster this. John Paul, a century later, is firmly within the liberty-creativity-productivity path.
But Leo XIII and John Paul are exceptions. All the other popes since have emphasized, more or less, social justice and redistribution as the answer to poverty. Francis certainly did, and Dilexi Te does too. So if Dilexi Te does reflect Leo XIV’s thinking, it means that on economic matters, Leo XIII’s legacy will not be taken up by Leo XIV. More time, though, is needed before any such becomes clear.
The long Christian tradition—so long that it goes back to the Pentateuch—makes it clear that concrete care for the poor is not optional. In the blunt expression of Archbishop Charles Chaput, “If we ignore the poor, we will go to hell.” The Christian gospel makes love for the poor and the corporal works of mercy essential, as seen in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16) and the teaching of Jesus on the criteria of judgment (Matthew 25).
Nowhere in the magisterium was it expressed more succinctly than by Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est:
The Church’s deepest nature is expressed in her three-fold responsibility: of proclaiming the word of God (kerygma-martyria), celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia), and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia). These duties presuppose each other and are inseparable. For the Church, charity is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well be left to others, but is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being.
It’s very strange that Dilexi Te does not cite that lapidary exultation of charitable activity as being of equal importance to the sacred liturgy—by Benedict, no less! Benedict, deeply immersed in the teaching of the Fathers, especially Augustine, absorbed their searing indictment of Christians who worship God but do not give to the poor.
Dilexi Te quotes the famous teaching of St. John Chrysostom that “not giving to the poor is stealing from them,” and summarizes the approach of St. Augustine: “the poor are not just people to be helped, but the sacramental presence of the Lord.” Dilexi Te traces in some detail the corpus of patristic teaching—likely reflecting the spiritual and intellectual formation of an Augustinian pope.
While an urgent summons to live more fully Matthew 25 is never out of place—especially for Christians in affluent countries—it is also conventional and without controversy, suitable perhaps for a new pope who has quite deliberately made a priority of fostering unity and turning down the temperature on ecclesial controversies.
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