Leo XIV Continues Francis’s Distorted Vision for the Church in First Exhortation 'Dilexi Te'

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The Gospel According to Marx: Leo XIV’s ‘Dilexi Te’ and the Church of the Poor
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.

Chris Jackson via Hiraeth in Exile | Oct 10, 2025

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.


From Revelation to Redistribution
“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.


Installing Francis as the Template
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.”


A Preferential Option becomes a Preferential Theory
Catholic tradition recognizes the ordo caritatis: God first, then the immortal soul of one’s neighbor, then material relief ordered to salvation. “Dilexi Te” inverts the emphasis by elevating a “preferential option” from moral stance to organizing principle for ecclesial life. The option starts as love; it hardens into lens. Once the lens is in place, everything appears as a spatial or structural problem awaiting coordinated solutions from “governing structures” animated by “popular movements.” Charity, without ceasing to be named, is routinely instrumentalized for institutional redesign.


Press-Ganging the Fathers
Chrysostom thunders against hoarding; Ambrose calls almsgiving justice; Augustine binds worship to mercy. None of that is controversial. The problem is the usage. The Fathers admonish persons unto conversion, almsgiving, and just dealing. “Dilexi Te” cites them to buttress an agenda about systems, intermediating movements, and state-level correctives. The Fathers’ target is sin in the heart radiating outward; here, the causality runs the other way: alter structures and hearts will come along.


Monasticism Reimagined as a Social Model
The text’s tour through Basil’s Basiliad and Benedictine hospitality is beautiful, but subtly misleading. Monasteries were schools of conversion whose works of mercy flowed from vowed poverty, stability, and contemplation ordered to God. “Dilexi Te” repackages this into an “economy of solidarity,” a civilizational template. That shift confuses a sign of holiness with a scalable policy. The cloister shows what grace can do in a vowed community; it does not tell cities how to zone.


Migrants and the Pastoralization of Policy
The section on migration pours warm milk onto hard problems. It folds borders, law, and sovereignty into one spiritual gesture. “welcome, protect, promote, integrate,” then generalizes those verbs to “all peripheries.” This is not theology so much as emotion. Scripture commands hospitality; tradition also commands rulers to secure peace and justice for the common good. When an exhortation treats prudential trade-offs as if they were beatitudes, it catechizes consciences into conflating charity with a single political posture.


Popular Movements as Moral Proxies
“Dilexi Te” lauds “popular leaders” who fight “the empire of money” and invites institutions to absorb their “torrent of moral energy.” Which movements? Led by whom, funded how, accountable to what ends? The document offers poetry where the Church owes the faithful criteria. Absent those criteria, “popular movements” function as a halo for street-level activism that often brings its own errors: class resentment, revolutionary romanticism, and the habit of treating the Church’s sacramental life as a mobilization engine.


Structures of Sin—And of Simplification
When the exhortation declares contemporary economies a “new tyranny” and inequality “the root of social ills,” it substitutes thesis for diagnosis. Catholic social doctrine has never canonized one economic model; it proposes principles (dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, the common good) and leaves room for legitimate schools to argue means. Calling the market a dictatorship while prescinding from the dictatorships of debt, bureaucracy, and ideology is not balance; but branding.


The Poor as Subjects—and as Epistemic Oracle
There is truth in insisting the poor are subjects, not objects. But “Dilexi Te” leans further, claiming the poor possess “unique insights indispensable” to Church and humanity. Grace does not track income. Poverty can dispose the heart to humility; it does not confer charisms of analysis. The risk here is a new clericalism, this time of condition, where suffering becomes credential. The Church listens to the poor because they are Christ’s little ones; she judges proposals by truth, not pedigree.


Almsgiving Rehabilitated, with an Asterisk
The final chapter unexpectedly praises almsgiving, prayer, and personal contact. Good. Yet even here, the commendation is yoked to a thesis about jobs, networks, and institutions: almost an apology for mentioning alms at all. Classic doctrine never pitted the works of mercy against just structures. It insisted that conversion births both. “Dilexi Te” reads like an encyclical embarrassed by piety until the penultimate page.


What’s Missing
Sin and salvation appear, but mostly as background. The document rarely speaks of the first poverty, original and actual sin, or the highest wealth: sanctifying grace. It says much about “spaces that connect” and little about the First Commandment. It treats cities, flows, and margins with care, but gives scant guidance on the order of charity, the duty of worship, the danger of envy, the difference between righteous zeal and class animus. The supernatural horizon is present; it is not governing.


A Catholic Way that Doesn’t Need Slogans
A thoroughly Catholic response to poverty begins with conversion, worship, and the spiritual works of mercy, then radiates into temporal prudence. It affirms the universal destination of goods without dissolving the right to private property. It defends just wages and associations while insisting on subsidiarity: help at the lowest competent level first. It welcomes the stranger while securing peace and justice for the political community. It treats the poor as neighbors to be loved, not as a constituency to be organized for someone’s theory of history.


The Trade the Text Makes
“Dilexi Te” wants a Church “for the poor.” The saints already gave us one: Teresa at the bedside, Vincent in the streets, Benedict in the cloister, countless hidden souls in parish basements and kitchen tables. The document trades that school of sanctity for a school of strategy. It canonizes a lens. It treats the poor less as the field where charity flowers and more as the lever by which the whole ecclesial machine must be reconfigured. Love becomes architecture. Mercy becomes messaging. And the Gospel’s hard edge, repent and believe, softens into a policy preface.

The poor deserve our love because Christ loved them, bled for them, and still waits for us in their wounds. They deserve better than being conscripted into Leo’s globalist humanism; pressed into service as mascots for a baptized socialism that confuses charity with revolution and grace with good intentions.