About 25 years ago, during the weekly Friday evening Mass in the living room of the Bishop Dingman House of the Des Moines Catholic Worker, a man entered from the street and joined us. Visitors were not uncommon and were always welcome among our hodgepodge of worshippers that included poor folks, children, grandparents, widows, people of color, college students, high school dropouts, professors, and Catholic Workers.
This guest, however, kept speaking loudly and interrupting Frank Cordaro, a resident and, at the time, priest who was presiding at the coffee table that doubled as an altar. Then, during the liturgy of the Eucharist, Cordaro paused and calmly escorted the man to the kitchen, providing him a seat and a warm meal. The rest of us watched in stunned silence until Cordaro returned with a smile and said to us, “Don’t you hate it when Jesus does that?”
Cordaro’s suggestive question presupposes a maxim about the mutual relationship between worship, belief, and action: lex orandi, lex credendi, and lex agendi. Just as there is a correlation between prayer and belief, so too there should be a connection between the liturgy and morality, the Mass and social justice, the Eucharist and ethics. I remembered Frank’s question and noticed this liturgical-theological-ethical thread as I read Pope Leo XIV’s first apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te (Latin for “I Have Loved You” and subtitled “To All Christians On Love for the Poor”), signed Oct. 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, and publicly announced on Oct. 9, the feast day of St. John Henry Newman.
Begun by Pope Francis as a sequel to his last encyclical Dilixit Nos (Latin for “He Loved Us” and subtitled “On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ”), Dilexi Te—of which Leo wrote “I am happy to make this document my own—adding some reflections,”—is the latest contribution to the Catholic social tradition that includes the magisterium’s “veritable treasury of significant teachings concerning the poor.” And the exhortation couldn’t be timelier.
Conditions around the world, including in the United States, seem like a replay of what was happening in the late 19th century when the pope’s namesake, Pope Leo XIII, issued the encyclical that inaugurated modern Catholic social teaching, Rerum Novarum (On Capital and Labor) in 1891. During the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age of the robber barons, millions were unemployed or labored in deplorable working conditions, getting paid very little—especially when contrasted with management and owners—and they lacked time off, insurance, education, a pension, and healthcare.
In Europe and in North America, Rerum Novarum inspired movements like Catholic Action, as well as theologians such as Virgil Michel, O.S.B. who linked Catholic social teaching with the liturgical movement, and John Augustine Ryan, who contributed to the U.S. bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction and influenced the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. On the Protestant side, there was the Social Gospel movement, led by professors and pastors like Walter Rauschenbusch, who wrote the bestselling Prayers of the Social Awakening (The Pilgrim Press) in 1910, and Charles Sheldon, who coined the phrase “What would Jesus do?” in his popular book In His Steps (Chicago Advance Publishing) in 1896.
Unlike Rerum Novarum, which employed philosophical natural law reasoning, Dilexi Te is addressed to “all Christians,” draws extensively on scripture, and urges us to “come to appreciate the close connection between Christ’s love and his summons to care for the poor.” Indeed, its central theme is: “Love for the Lord, then, is one with love for the poor.” Among the gospel passages supporting this claim is Jesus’ saying, “Just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).
As Leo XIV observes, “This is not a matter of mere human kindness but a revelation: contact with those who are lowly and powerless is a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history.” Again, in contrast to Rerum Novarum’s philosophical grammar, Dilexi Te’s approach is theological, making a deeply significant Christological point about Jesus’ incarnation, birth, life, and work. According to Dilexi Te, it is “not enough to profess the doctrine of God’s Incarnation in general terms,” but instead, “we need to understand clearly that the Lord took on a flesh that hungers and thirsts, and experiences infirmity and imprisonment.” In other words, “poverty marked every aspect of Jesus’ life.”
Even if we don’t hate it when Jesus appears as the least of these, recalling Cordaro’s comment, Leo worries that many Christians downplay charity as merely optional and presume that “poverty is a choice.” While it may be a choice for some, the poverty of most is the consequence of “structures of sin” such as unjust social, economic, and political policies and institutions. On this point, Dilexi Te quotes from documents by Latin American bishops, including the Aparecida Document that Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who would become Pope Francis, oversaw. There are also many forms of poverty, and those who are poor include people who are “socially marginalized” and who are vulnerable or oppressed —in particular, women who are “doubly poor” as they “endure situations of exclusion, mistreatment and violence.”
Jesus, in the Gospel of Matthew, echoed a line from the prophet Hosea: “The Lord of all asks for mercy, not sacrifice.” Variations of this quote surface throughout Dilexi Te. Worship is not genuine if it is divorced from social justice. Leo writes that through the prophets, God denounces “the injustices committed against the weakest, and exhorts Israel to renew its worship from within, because one cannot pray and offer sacrifice while oppressing the weakest and poorest.”
In addition to scripture, Dilexi Te highlights this link between authentic worship and love for those who are poor in the writings of prominent theologians and saints in the history of the church. Justin Martyr, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Augustine of Hippo emphasized “with crystal clarity that, if the faithful do not encounter Christ in the poor who stand at the door, they will not be able to worship him even at the altar.” As an Augustinian, Leo surely added, “For Augustine, the poor are not just people to be helped, but the sacramental presence of the Lord.”
Likewise, Dilexi Te mentions the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, the Hospital Sisters, the Little Sisters of Divine Providence, and other Catholics who were “faithful to the One who said, ‘I was sick and you visited me.’” We don’t kneel only during Mass; indeed, according to Leo, “When the Church kneels beside a leper, a malnourished child or an anonymous dying person, she fulfills her deepest vocation: to love the Lord where he is most disfigured.”
Like the body and the blood of Christ we receive at Mass, our poor brothers and sisters also are the real presence of Christ. “For Christians, the poor are not a sociological category,” Leo writes, “but the very ‘flesh’ of Christ.” This Eucharistic vision of our neighbors who are poor obviously brings to my mind Cordaro’s remark at the Catholic Worker.
Moreover, Leo hopes that “our relationship with the Lord, expressed in worship, also aims to free us from the risk of living our relationships according to a logic of calculation and self-interest.” Yet, many of us—and I include myself—go through the motions at Mass, more like passive pew potatoes than active and conscious participants, as Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy) called for. Many of us worship regularly while leading lives that are indifferent to social injustice and to those who are poor.
To address this problem, in the early 1900s, Virgil Michel, the Benedictine social and liturgical reformer, emphasized the need for education in parishes and schools about the formative connection between liturgy and social justice. In Dilixi Te, Leo recommends engaging in the works of mercy, including almsgiving, “as a sign of the authenticity of worship” and a “necessary means of contact, encounter and empathy with those less fortunate.” Experiences with and for poor folks not only are an expression of authentic worship, but are morally formative and thereby can, in turn, help make our worship more authentic. I would include listening to and learning from women.
Another memory comes to mind from 40 years ago when I was an undergraduate student and volunteered during spring break at an orphanage in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti. One evening, my friends and I had leftover bread from dinner, so we distributed it to children who had gathered on the street. They quickly consumed it, but one small boy slowly approached me with his piece—still uneaten—in his hands. When he reached me, he took the bread, broke it, and gave half to me.
As Margaret Scott, a Handmaid of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and author of The Eucharist and Social Justice (Paulist Press), concludes, “Do this in memory of me” is about eucharistic conversion and a “commitment to enter into the strange yet dynamic logic of Christ’s love.” I wonder if Leo has read her book.
Image: Wikimedia Commons/Edgar Beltran, The Pillar (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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