I read Mark Bauerlein’s essay in Crisis Magazine and felt that familiar jolt. He lived in a rough tenement and saw real people—flawed, ordinary, sometimes difficult. Then he looked at Pope Leo XIV’s Apostolic Exhortation, Dilexi Te, and saw the same problem that has run through recent papal teaching: the poor are treated almost like an unfallen class—closer to Christ, more insightful, somehow purer simply because they lack money. The document continues the line begun under Pope Francis, speaking in sweeping terms about “structural causes” while offering almost no concrete portraits of actual human beings with real moral struggles.
Pope Francis set the tone years earlier. In Evangelii Gaudium he wrote that the poor “have much to teach us. Not only do they share in the sensus fidei, but in their difficulties they know the suffering Christ. We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them.” He repeatedly called the poor “the flesh of Christ.” That language is moving on the surface, but it romanticizes an entire group and turns material lack into a kind of automatic holiness. It pairs easily with talk of “structural sin” and systemic racism—the idea that injustice is so baked into institutions that personal responsibility fades into the background. That framing has become a favorite of cultural Marxism: blame the system, downplay personal accountability, and keep expanding the programs that claim to fix it.
Catholic social teaching has always held two things together: a preferential option for the poor and the equal reach of original sin, the dignity of work, personal responsibility, and the principle of subsidiarity. Original sin touches every person equally—rich and poor. No economic condition makes anyone less fallen or more automatically holy. The dignity of work is not optional; it is how human beings participate in God’s creative order and build self-respect. Subsidiarity insists that higher authorities must not take over what individuals, families, and local communities can and should do for themselves. Dilexi Te and the teaching it continues lean almost exclusively on the preferential option while softening or ignoring the rest. That imbalance is not traditional Catholic teaching. It is a distortion.
My own family lived the opposite reality. My father abandoned us when my mother was pregnant with her fourth child. She refused welfare, worked two jobs, and raised four kids. At ten I had two outfits bought for five dollars that I washed over and over. The Catholic school eventually expelled us for unpaid tuition. My brother ran a paper route alone to pay his own way through freshman year until he couldn’t sustain it.
We were situationally poor, but our mother never let us feel like victims. She taught us that God had given each of us gifts, and we were to use them to the fullest—not squander them and sit back while others supported us as we wasted what He had given. At eleven I started babysitting to earn my own money. At fourteen I took a job as a waitress. From that day forward I have never stopped working. The habit of showing up, earning my keep, and developing whatever God-given talents I had was drilled into us early. It was not glamorous. It was simply what you did if you wanted to live with dignity.
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