Leo XIV’s first exhortation promises a Church “close to the poor.” What it delivers is a baptized socialism where salvation sounds suspiciously like wealth redistribution.
The text opens with Revelation and Magnificat but lands, almost immediately, on the United Nations, Medellín, Aparecida, and “popular movements.” That arc gives the game away. Scripture supplies the epigraphs; the program comes from the sociology. The result is a document that speaks tenderly of almsgiving and the sick while catechizing the faithful into a theory of power, space, and class. If love for the poor is the hook, the line and sinker are political “structures of sin,” “dictatorship of an economy that kills,” and the Church as partner to movements that “make history.” The Fathers are canvassed, monasticism is enlisted, and Francis is effectively made co-author from beyond the grave. The poor are everywhere in the text, yet poverty itself becomes the explanatory key for everything else the document wants to do.
“Dilexi Te” starts with the woman who anoints Christ and the Lord who identifies with “the least.” That is safe ground. But the shift comes quickly: love for the poor is framed not only as Christian duty but as the privileged site where God speaks to history. This move allows the exhortation to treat proximity to poverty as a hermeneutic, almost a sacrament of insight, through which the Church must reread worship, mission, and even urban planning. The anthropology thins. The poor are not just neighbors to be loved for God’s sake; they become a locus of revelation for policy.
Leo presents the text as the completion of Francis’s unfinished project and then proceeds to quote and echo him at decisive junctures. That rhetorical graft makes Francis’s social lexicon (structures, exclusion, throwaway culture, integral development) the implicit standard of orthodoxy. One can love the poor with heroic intensity and still dispute the prudential package; “Dilexi Te” blurs that line. What should remain a realm of arguable means is recast as a near-creedal “path to holiness.”
Continue reading at Hiraeth In Exile