If people saw Pope Leo XIV as a builder of unity, then this exhortation provides “a blueprint for how this authentic unity of the Church has always been pursued: that is, through the path of holiness sought in touching the flesh of Christ in the poor,” said David Lantigua, the William W. and Anna Jean Cushwa Co-Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism and an associate professor of theology.
“The exhortation is much needed in our divisive and polarizing times, where wealth has increased along with inequality,” Lantigua said. “It offers a profoundly biblical theology of poverty that recognizes both the evil of material poverty but also the saving power of voluntary poverty, both of which were embodied in Christ, the Church’s suffering founder.”
That path to holiness through Christ’s poverty and love of the poor presents “a bold challenge to all Christians,” Lantigua added, especially “those comfortable with the accumulation of wealth and attainment of security and privilege.”
“The poor, in their various manifestations, teach us what trust and dependence on the saving and liberating God looks like in today’s world,” he said.
As a companion to Pope Francis’s final encyclical, “Dilexit Nos,” this exhortation “teaches emphatically and in no uncertain terms that true worship demands love for the poor, which is one with love for the Lord,” Lantigua said. “This is another way of saying, as the Epistle of James, that faith requires works, otherwise it is dead. Prayer without almsgiving, and charity without social action, are but empty prayer and false charity.”
“Dilexi Te” is not just a tribute to St. Francis of Assisi and to Pope Francis, “whose presence is felt everywhere in the document,” he said, but is also “an ode to the Latin American Church and the theological option for the poor” that has provided doctrinal clarity for the global Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council.
According to Lantigua, one of the significant claims of the exhortation is that Vatican II should be reinterpreted as representing “a milestone in the Church’s understanding of the poor in God’s saving plan” that was later taken up and expanded by Latin American bishops, especially the martyred archbishop St. Oscar Romero.
“As a missionary in Peru, Leo XIV attests to the thematic contributions of the Latin American Church’s option for the poor as it pertains to the structural sin of material poverty and the recognition of the poor,” Lantigua said, “who are subjects of God’s way of telling history and not objects of philanthropy.
“‘I have loved you’ refers to those with little power in the eyes of the world — the poor, sick, children, elderly, imprisoned, oppressed women, needy migrants — yet who have great power from the Word of God through the eyes of true faith. Authentic love toward those with little power, as the parable of the Good Samaritan shows, is not something easy or nice to do, yet it is a condition for discipleship and working out our salvation in fear and trembling.”