What’s missing from Dilexi Te?

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 16, 2025

Just a week after its publication, Dilexi Te has almost disappeared from public discussions. Is the first major teaching document of Pope Leo XIV really destined to be so soon forgotten?

The release of this papal document had been anxiously awaited, as Vatican-watchers anticipated the first clear indications of the new Pope’s pastoral plans. After years of controversy and confusion under Pope Francis, would Leo steer the Barque of Peter back into calmer waters, into the mainstream of Catholic thought? Or would he push ahead with his predecessor’s program? The first few months of Leo’s pontificate had not provided answers to those questions; he had carefully avoided major controversies, while making sympathetic gestures toward Catholics on both sides of various ecclesial disputes. But an apostolic exhortation—especially one on a document as fraught with political overtones as poverty—seemed sure to resolve the mysteries.

It did not. Dilexi Te provided no fireworks, no theological novelties, no promises of ambitious new papal initiatives. The first reports in the American secular media, predictably enough, emphasized the points on which the Pope’s thoughts conflicted with White House rhetoric. Just as predictably, some Catholic commentators rushed to interpret the document as either a definitive break with, or (more frequently) a wholesale embrace of, the thinking of the late Pope Francis. But all of those interpretations were strained. In fact it almost seemed an over-reaction when some commentators accused others of over-reacting. Dilexi Te is not a political statement, nor even primarily a doctrinal one. Pope Leo changed his predecessor’s plan, turning what Pope Francis had originally conceived as an encyclical, a teaching document, into an apostolic exhortation, a pastoral document of somewhat less magisterial weight that is, as the term suggests, an exhortation to the faithful. The essential message of the document should be familiar and unobjectionable to any Christian: the moral obligation to care for the poor.

Dilexi Te has a challenging message, if it is read—as it was intended—as a challenge to the Christian conscience. But it is not the sort of papal pronouncement that sparks intramural battles within the Church. In fact what is most remarkable about this apostolic exhortation is what it does not say. But to appreciate what is missing, one must have some appreciation for the tradition of Catholic social teaching—an appreciation that is rarely found in the secular media.

The Francis Effect

Since his election, Pope Leo has rarely missed an opportunity to pay homage to Pope Francis. In a real sense Dilexi Te is part of that homage; the new Pontiff took up the project that the former Pontiff had begun, reworked the draft, and made it his own. Some critics of Pope Francis may regret that decision, hoping that the Catholic world can shake off the influence of the contentious Argentine Pontiff as quickly as possible. And it is true that soon enough, Pope Leo will be forced to recognize the divisions created by his predecessor, and the consequent erosion of papal authority. But it is another over-reaction to suggest that by finishing his predecessor’s draft, Leo proved himself a loyal disciple of the Francis approach. After all, Pope Francis picked up an unfinished draft by his immediate predecessor, Benedict XVI, to produce his first encyclical, Lumen Fidei. And today no one suggests that Francis was a clone of Benedict.

As with Lumen Fidei, so too with Dilexi Te, a careful reader can often discern which passages were written by the deceased Pope. A reference to “the dictatorship of an economy that kills” seems likely to have come from Francis, as do the hyperbolic claims that some ideologies “dismiss or ridicule charitable works,” and reject the right of states to “exercise any form of control” over the free market. There may be a few people who take such extreme views, but their influence is felt mostly in Hollywood movies, not in government policies, and such overheated rhetoric detracts from the gravity of a papal exhortation.

Still Dilexi Te does not call for any sort of sweeping political reforms. It is a reform of the heart that Pope Leo wants: a more urgent commitment, on the part of individuals and institutions, to the work of charity. Most of the apostolic exhortation is devoted to pounding home the message—consistent all through the Bible and the history of the Church—that the faithful must care for their neighbors in need. On the few occasions when the document offers specific practical suggestions, they are utterly unexceptionable (and, significantly, seem to bear the style of Pope Leo): as with the call to almsgiving—preferably on an individual basis—and the observation that “the most important way to help the disadvantaged is to assist them in finding a good job.”

Discordant Notes

There are, to be sure, passages in the document that will grate on the raw sensibilities of faithful Catholics who have felt the lash of Vatican rhetoric over the course of the past decade. Particularly on the issue of immigration—which American secular reporters quickly chose for their headline stories, Dilexi Te misses some crucial distinctions.

Yes, both the Old Testament and the New warn believers that they, and the societies in which they live, will be judged on their treatment of strangers in need. But this apostolic exhortation, like so many recent Vatican pronouncements, makes short shrift of a society’s legitimate right to protect its own culture and enforce its own laws. In Europe especially, the pattern of immigration today can be seen not merely the movement of helpless people seeking refuge, but as an Islamic bid to take over once-Christian societies that have lost the will to protect their own cultural heritage. Surely the Catholic Church should have something to say about the religious dimension of that rising conflict.

Similarly, in its laudatory treatment of “popular movements,” Dilexi Te appears to embrace only movements associated with the political Left. Isn’t the American pro-life movement a perfect example of a “popular movement” that deserves Church support? And the French Manif pour tous?

More importantly, Dilexi Te risks losing the essential focus of Catholic pastoral work when it refers to “structures of sin” in the global economy. Structures do not sin; men and women do. And the global economy will not go to heaven or hell. The work of the Church is bringing the means of salvation to individual souls, not reforming the structures of society.

Oh, those structures of society do need to be reformed. But they will be reformed if and only if the people involved have reformed their own lives—if and only if good people make the decisions that will tone down the excesses of materialism and consumerism, and help us all to recognize that just as there are many forms of poverty, spiritual and moral and cultural, so there are many forms of wealth which our secularized society fails to recognize. In his appraisal of Dilexi Te, Anthony Esolen made the important observation that “much of the harm of poverty among us can be alleviated by a general embrace of poverty, or at least a distaste for wealth, flash, power, glory, and the ceaseless noise of the licentious.”

The Catholic Critique

It would be tragic, however, if politically conservative Catholics let their discontent with these aspects of the papal document distract them from its central message. No believing Christian should reject the commandment of charity, of course. But more than that; no faithful Catholic should defend the excesses of the global world order today. We have seen, in recent years, an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the working classes to the wealthy, an obscene concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a privileged elite. Maybe the Pope is wrong to focus on economic inequality, but who can justify the corporate culture in which chief executives earn spectacular salaries while their workers are laid off and their stockholders see their share prices fall?

In the US, the most interesting critique of this rising inequality, in fact, has come not from the political Left but from the conservative Charles Murray, in his important book Coming Apart. We are indeed a society that is “coming apart” at the seams—not because of economic inequality by itself, but because of the loss of the moral underpinnings that are essential to the proper functions of a healthy market economy. A free market is based on the individual’s freedom to choose, and if individuals lose the habit of choosing wisely the results are devastating. Thus our culture has come to tolerate, then actively to promote, moral evils. Our culture has seen the devastating breakdown of families and the alienation of whole socio-economic blocs. This is a society in desperate need of reform.

And for a full century now, the tradition of Catholic social teaching has offered a template for that reform. Starting with Pope Leo XIII (whose name the current Pontiff took for his own, surely a significant choice), magisterial teaching has criticized both socialism and capitalism. True, papal teaching has condemned socialism outright. And perhaps it is also true that papal encyclicals have (until Centesimus Annus) been slow to recognize the enormous benefits that a market economy has brought to the world and especially to the poor. But throughout the century, Pontiffs have consistently stressed that a free-market economy must be moored to moral principle.

So the most important contribution that the Church can make to the discussion of economic problems is a reaffirmation of the fundamental tenets of Catholic social teaching, which in turn are derived from fundamental tenets of Catholic doctrine. Begin, for instance, with the vital importance of the family, the foundational building-block of a healthy social and economic order. In any discussion of poverty, the most practical advice that we can give to young people is to “get married and stay married”—a message perfectly congruent with Catholic teaching, but unfortunately missing from Dilexi Te. To underline that message, we might even resurrect the calls from earlier Pontiffs for a “living wage,” to ensure that a working man can support his family and allow his wife to dedicate herself to the more important work of forming their children.

The topic of subsidiarity, another keystone of Catholic social teaching, is also not to be found in Dilexi Te. But Pope Leo does, in his closing section on almsgiving, lay heavy stress on the ways in which individual contact with the poor can change the lives of both the donors and the recipients, providing spiritual benefits that bureaucratic government programs cannot possibly match:

Almsgiving at least offers us a chance to halt before the poor, to look into their eyes, to touch them and to share something of ourselves with them. In any event, almsgiving, however modest, brings a touch of pietas into a society otherwise marked by the frenetic pursuit of personal gain. In the words of the Book of Proverbs: “Those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with the poor.”

That insight—which, unless I am much mistaken, is distinctively the contribution of Pope Leo—drives home the central message of Dilexi Te. Charitable work, while it eases the material needs of the poor, can do a much greater service by easing the spiritual poverty of the rich.