Care for the poor is both “the burning heart of the Church’s mission” and the heart of Pope Leo’s first message to the world’s Christians. The apostolic exhortation, released earlier this month, is called Dilexi Te – I have loved you – and subtitled On love for the poor.
To take in its message, I first needed to set aside my visceral reaction to the term “the poor.” As the document points out, poverty is most often not a choice, but a consequence of “structural sin.” To help keep this truth in sight, we might more appropriately refer to “people who are impoverished” – those who have been made poor by social, economic and political systems that ignore and dismiss them. Those who are impoverished, then, are those who lack the resources for subsistence, who may be socially marginalized, or who “find themselves in a condition of personal or social weakness or fragility, the poverty of those who have no rights, no space, no freedom.”
These are the ones made poor through the social, political and economic systems put in place by choices made over the course of 250 years of the republic. Where these inequitable and unjust, dehumanizing systems still exist, it is the responsibility of Christians to dismantle them, for the sake of those who suffer and for the well-being of our own souls.
Lest we be tempted to pass off the message of this papal document as outside the concerns of contemporary society, consider current economic news. One recent New York Times headline put it succinctly: “Wealthy Americans Are Spending. People With Less Are Struggling.” The story begins in Pilsen, a Chicago neighborhood where I once lived and ministered. It contrasts the life of an unemployed construction worker standing in line at a Pilsen food pantry with the wealthy who have the resources to fuel a booming economy on the Magnificent Mile, 3 miles away. The story quotes a statistic from Moody’s that says nearly half of the spending being done right now is accounted for by just the top 10 percent of U.S. households. The rest of us? Struggling.
This economic disparity is worrying, for anyone paying attention. A famous economist is peddling a book that warns conditions are once again ripe for a repeat of the economic market crash that led to the great depression of my parents’ childhood. Lest the wealthy forget, this will not be a happy situation for anyone, including themselves.
So, it seems the pope and his predecessor Pope Francis, who actually wrote most of the Dilexi Te, got the timing right.
It is a demanding read, not because it is difficult to understand, but because it challenges those of us Christians who may have forgotten that Jesus, the Incarnate God, became poor, lived among the impoverished, and requires that we serve and love them as he did.
The document included an inspiring summary of the poverty God – God – has chosen throughout the Judeo-Christian history of salvation, a story that comes to us in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. It also includes a stirring summary of the way holy women and men, from the desert fathers and mothers through the most recent founders and members of religious institutes, responded, and are responding, to the needs of the poor.
The earliest wisdom figures of the church were unequivocal: caring for those who are unable to support themselves and their families for whatever reason is the responsibility of the Church. In the fourth century, St. John Chrysostom preached: “Not giving to the poor is stealing from them, defrauding them of their lives, because what we have belongs to them.”
Pope Leo’s own spiritual guide, St. Augustine, acknowledged that while we naturally care for the needs of those close to us, “… if Christ dwells in you, also be charitable to strangers.” Such a contrast with the logic a certain prominent Catholic politician has lately peddled!
The second century martyr St. Justin was clear about who those strangers might be: orphans and widows, the sick, those in other types of want, those imprisoned, sojourning strangers – in a word, so many of the same people who suffer today because of the inhuman policies of governments.
What Dilexi Te brought home to me is something our Dominican Sister St. Catherine of Siena said succinctly: we walk on two feet: charity and justice. In other words, it is up to individual Christian believers and the societies in which we live to look after people who are impoverished. Individuals are not off the hook for taking care of the persons who are homeless on our city streets or marginalized by unjust policies – and neither are our municipalities, states and federal governments.
Sister Beth Murphy, OP, is the communication director for the Dominican Sisters of Springfield.
