First Words from Leo

I was looking forward to the first magisterial utterance, framed as an exhortation, from the Chicago-born leader of the Roman Catholic Church. And what Leo XIV had to say did not disappoint.

Some early news reports construed the statement breathlessly as a critique of Donald Trump's anti-immigrant policies. And yes, "Dilexi te" ("I have loved you") does address that cruelty. But the essence of the statement is much more foundational. It is all about unjust power and the violence that is inherent in unjustly gained wealth. In reading the statement, it was impossible for me not to hear the voice of the Jesus of the Gospels coming through loud and clear.

I urge you to spend a bit of time with how the Vatican News Service treated the document: Pope Leo in 'Dilexi te': Faith cannot be separated from love for the poor. You can also get the gist from CNN's short account.

Building on work begun by Pope Francis, Leo goes directly after the structures that create poverty — what he calls the "dictatorship of an economy that kills." He targets what we have come to know as the winner-take-all economy, and he discounts the widespread idea that worldwide poverty is actually declining by noting that the promoters of this idea use out-of-date criteria for measuring poverty and suffering. Without specifically mentioning artificial intelligence in his exhortation (although Leo did mention AI just two days following his elevation), the new pope warns that inequality is rapidly accelerating under the influence of new technologies and wealth consolidation at the top.

Crucially, Leo critiques not just structural injustice but the poisonous ideology that supports it: the "pseudo-scientific" belief that a "free-market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty." He ridicules trickle-down theory, noting with some asperity that if this theory were true, we ought to be showering more pastoral support on the rich in the hope that they will be moved to drop a few more crumbs to the poor.

This is a powerful statement indeed, and of course it flies directly in the face of Trump's contempt for the poor and his fawning embrace of the world's richest people, many of them criminals of his own stripe. But in my view, the statement's power comes precisely from the fact that it is not a political statement (and certainly not a cheap shot). This exhortation is a theological statement, and it draws its strength from the scriptural depth that undergirds it.

We should be clear that what the Church has long described as God's "preferential option" for the poor has never been some kind of New Left or Vatican II deviation from Christian teaching. God's desire to liberate the poor from systems of oppression is the central theme of scripture, from the Exodus story through the prophets and psalms and right through the gospel accounts, the Acts of the Apostles, the epistles, and the Book of Revelation.

I note that the rubric "I have loved you" is drawn from the Book of Revelation and specifically from Chapter 3, in which the remnant churches get sorted between those that have remained faithful and those that are lukewarm, or even dead, on account of selling out.

Pope Leo seems to be asking all of us, in the midst of our own mounting apocalypse, "Whose side are you on?"

~ Peter

Photo credit: Edgar Beltrán, The Pillar, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons