Point 1. The Apostolic Exhortation
Pope Leo XIV’s apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te focuses on the Christian vocation of following Christ necessarily through encounter with the poor. The exhortation is not primarily a sociological or economic analysis but an ecclesial and christological proclamation: the Church exists because Christ loved the poor, chose to be one with them, and continues to encounter the world through them. The Pope’s central conviction is simple yet demanding: a Church that does not recognize Christ in the poor risks losing contact with Christ himself.
On this first day of 2026, we are invited to “appreciate the close connection between Christ’s love and his summons to care for the poor”—and grasp where perhaps in our life or in our mission, in the way we handle financial resources, manage our institutions, or care for our companions, friends and relatives, the love of Christ and the care of the poor are disjoined.
Pope Leo XIV considers it essential to insist on this path as the path to holiness—versus whatever career plans and ambitions for success may consume us in our following of Christ. For “in this call to recognize him in the poor and the suffering, we see revealed the very heart of Christ, his deepest feelings and choices, which every saint seeks to imitate.”
So as Dilexi Te is not only about the poor but about loving Christ loving us, we are invited to examine how it is that we experience his love, his Heart, which with every First Friday or every repetition of the Spiritual Exercises we freshly experience as we gaze on the Crucified Lord and ask, “If you have done this for me in love, Lord, what have I done for you? What am I doing for you? And what ought I do for you?”
Dilexi Te unfolds in five chapters, each contributing to this overarching message: that Christian discipleship, ecclesial identity, and social transformation must flow from a living relationship with Jesus Christ who “made himself poor for our sake” and founded a Church that must never forget this origin.
Chapter One: “Dilexi Te” — Love as the Origin of Mission. The exhortation begins with the words from the Book of Revelation—“I have loved you”—establishing love as the source of God’s action and the foundation of Christian life. Leo XIV insists that the Church’s concern for the poor is not a strategy, ideology, or optional emphasis, but the consequence of being loved first by Christ.
The Pope roots poverty not merely in material deprivation but in personal vulnerability, exclusion, and wounded dignity—dark realities Jesus embraced in the Incarnation. Christ’s solidarity with the poor is not external or romanticized; it is incarnational. By entering human fragility, Jesus reveals that God’s love is most clearly perceived where life is most threatened.
Thus, the Church’s mission to the poor is not philanthropy but participation in Christ’s own movement toward those pushed to the margins. To claim communion with Christ while remaining indifferent to the poor is, for Leo XIV, a contradiction.
Chapter Two: Jesus Christ, One with the Poor, deepens the Christological foundation. Leo XIV emphasizes that Jesus did not merely “care about” the poor—he chose to live among them, speak from their horizon, and allow them to evangelize him. The poor are not objects of charity but bearers of revelation.
This chapter insists that the poor possess a unique epistemological privilege: they know from within what it means to hope against hope. The Church, therefore, does not simply bring Christ to the poor; she encounters Christ already present among them.
This conviction leads to a crucial shift: the poor must be recognized as subjects of evangelization and transformation, not passive recipients of aid. Any ecclesial action that treats them otherwise risks instrumentalizing them and betraying the Gospel.
Chapter Three: The Church for the Poor (Briefly). While Chapter Three traces historical developments, acknowledging outstanding champions of Christian service to the poor—like St. Lawrence of Rome, St. Francis of Assisi and Mo. Teresa of Calcutta—as well as areas of Christian service—like the care of the sick, the education of the poor, the ministry to the imprisoned—in exhausting detail, Leo XIV’s key theological point can be stated succinctly: the Church is most faithful to herself when she is closest to the poor.
Periods of ecclesial renewal have consistently coincided with renewed proximity to those excluded by dominant social orders. Rather than idealizing the past, the Pope uses history as a mirror, reminding the Church that distance from the poor often correlates with accommodation to power, privilege, and self-preservation. The question he poses is not whether the Church serves the poor, but whether she belongs with them.
Chapter Four: Structures of Sin and the Participation of the Poor, addresses contemporary poverty and inequality without reducing them to individual moral failure. Leo XIV names “structures of sin”—economic systems, political arrangements, and cultural habits that normalize exclusion and concentrate wealth and power.
While avoiding technical economic prescriptions, the Pope insists that charity alone is insufficient where injustice is systemic. Christians must engage in the long and difficult work of transforming structures that produce poverty—labor markets that discard workers, financial systems detached from real human needs, and political cultures that silence the vulnerable.
Crucially, Leo XIV emphasizes that the poor must participate in this work as protagonists. Justice cannot be imposed from above, even with good intentions. Without the voices, experience, and agency of the poor, reform risks becoming another form of domination. The Pope challenges Christians—especially those with education, influence, and resources [like ourselves…]—to examine how their own security may be intertwined with these unjust structures. Conversion, he insists, must be both personal and social.
Chapter Five: The Good Samaritan and the Call to Closeness, functions as a spiritual and pastoral synthesis. Drawing on the parable of the Good Samaritan, Leo XIV presents Christian love as attentive presence before it becomes program or policy. The Samaritan’s mercy begins with seeing, stopping, and drawing near.
The Pope reclaims “almsgiving” in a nuanced way. While affirming the primacy of dignified work as the normal path out of poverty, he insists that almsgiving remains necessary when work is unavailable—and as a spiritual discipline that preserves personal encounter. Direct contact with the poor protects Christians from abstraction and ideological distance.
The apostolic exhortation culminates in its final sentence: “Through your work, your efforts to change unjust social structures or your simple, heartfelt gesture of closeness and support, the poor will come to realize that Jesus’ words are addressed personally to each of them: ‘I have loved you.’” Here Leo XIV unites action and contemplation. Structural change, pastoral service, and small acts of kindness are not competing paths but complementary witnesses to Christ’s love. The ultimate goal is not efficiency or success, but that the poor encounter themselves as personally loved by Christ through the Church’s presence.
Point 2. The Jesuits and Dilexi Te
Dilexi Te is a huge document of 121 paragraphs. It draws its power from Christians encountering the person of Christ, and in encountering his love of the poor, the outcast, the unevangelized, committing themselves to participate in that love. Yet, you may find it a point for consideration and prayer that of its 19,219 words, not once is the word “Jesuit” mentioned.
From its beginnings, the Society of Jesus has not been a “poor people’s order” in the mendicant sense, but it has repeatedly placed itself at frontiers where the poor were newly created by conquest, cultural rupture, or social transformation.
- Indigenous Peoples of North America
Jesuits in New France (Quebec and the Great Lakes region) in the 17th century—John de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues, Gabriel Lalemant, and others—did more than evangelize. They learned indigenous languages, defended indigenous autonomy against exploitative traders, documented injustices inflicted by European expansion, and often placed themselves between colonial power and vulnerable peoples. While not free from cultural blind spots, their efforts represented an early attempt to stand with peoples rendered poor and disposable by colonization. - The South American Reductions (Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia)
Perhaps the most striking Jesuit intervention on behalf of the poor were the South American Reductions in the 17th–18th centuries (recall the 1986 movie “The Mission”). The Reductions sought to protect indigenous Guaraní communities from enslavement, establish communal economies centered on dignity rather than extraction, and resist colonial encomienda systems. The Reductions embodied a concrete challenge to structures of sin, so much so that they contributed to political hostility toward the Society and its eventual suppression. They remain a paradigmatic example of structural imagination grounded in pastoral care. - Francis Xavier and Early Asian Missions
Francis Xavier’s mission to India, the Moluccas, and Japan (1540s) showed a preferential concern for fisherfolk, enslaved persons, and those abandoned by both local elites and colonial authorities. While Xavier did not develop a social doctrine, his missionary praxis—learning languages, confronting exploitative Portuguese practices, and insisting on accessibility of the Gospel—reflected a christological closeness to the poor and excluded. - Matteo Ricci and the China Mission
Although often associated with elites, Matteo Ricci and later Jesuit missionaries to China indirectly served the poor by promoting scientific and educational reforms, introducing medical and astronomical knowledge, and challenging cultural hierarchies that excluded large segments of society. The Jesuit method here was indirect service: transforming structures of knowledge and governance that eventually affected the poor. - The 20th Century: Faith and Justice
After Vatican II, the Jesuits made explicit, corporate commitments (beginning with GC 32) to the “service of faith and the promotion of justice.” Concrete expressions include accompaniment of campesinos and urban poor in Latin America, martyrdoms such as of Rutilio Grande SJ and of the Jesuits of the Universidad Centroamericana in El Salvador, involvement in refugee services (Jesuit Refugee Service), and grassroots pastoral work in Asia and Africa.
Here the Society moved decisively from effective proclamation of the Gospel to systemic critique and advocacy, often at great cost. The second of its Universal Apostolic Preferences was very much in the spirit of Dilexi Te: “Walking with the poor, the outcasts of the world, those whose dignity has been violated, in a mission of reconciliation and justice.”
So why do you think the Jesuits were left out of this Apostolic Exhortation? I ask this not to point out a historical lapse or an egregious flaw in the magisterial document, but to help us recognize how in our Church which now wishes to serve the poor more genuinely and efficaciously, there may be lapses or flaws or blind spots in our corporate and personal lives which may deter our commitment to this service of the poor. I leave this for your prayerful consideration.
Point 3: Following of Christ, Poor and Humble
In working with Dilexi Te—or at least considering now what it says—some of you may have noticed first, the exhortation exhibits a strong idealism: the apparent conviction that proclaiming Christ’s love for the poor and the Church’s identity as “for the poor” will itself generate the conversion necessary for social transformation. While the ideal indeed inspires the real, the document may underestimate how deeply embedded unjust structures are—and how resistant they can be even to sincere Christian or Jesuit commitment. They may underestimate how deeply unjust structures have penetrated our personal and corporate lives, and how easy it is to use our reason to rationalize our resistance to conversion.
You may have also noticed how in Dilexi Te there appears to be insufficient attention to the spirituality and discernment required for sustained structural change. You may have noticed the absence of a robust account of personal and communal discernment, of formation of conscience, of essential guidance in making great changes through interpreting consolation and desolation, and the slow, ambiguous labor of political engagement. Love of the poor alone does not guarantee wise action. Even as we admit that our use of resources, connections, prayer and our spirituality has not always been wise.
Despite these and other concerns, Dilexi Te remains a powerful summons. Its strength lies not in its policy or systemic precision but in recalling the Church to her evangelical center: Christ who loved the poor, loves the Church, and continues to speak through those who suffer.
The task now is to translate that love into discerned, realistic, and persevering action.
That is a tall and perhaps terrifying agenda for the start of 2026! For what does all of this mean for us as we consider corporately and personally the way we do mission? Where Christ is the vine, some of the branches may have died. They must be cut away. Some of the branches are fruitful. These the Father prunes. That they may bear more fruit, no matter the pain of the pruning. No matter the fear engendered in us as we consider this as applicable to ourselves.
So is “our evangelical center” Christ who loved the poor, loves the Church, and continues to speak through those who suffer? In this context it may be helpful to recall some of the impulses Fr. General Sosa shared with us in his letter: “Our vow of poverty in the following of Jesus poor and humble” (27 Sep 2021).
He says: “I am aware that an Ignatian examination of this dimension of our life always unsettles and shakes us internally.” Consider it calmly. In the silence of this recollection, of our retreats, or in our efforts at discernment, personal and communal.
“Consider it where our deep desires merge with God’s deep desire for us.” Consider it in the disquiet of our feelings of guilt, of our dependence on things, of our being threatened because of our fear of not being able to function without this latest gadget or that plastic credit card.
Fr. Sosa says: “The love of the person of the poor and humble Jesus that leads to following him is expressed in a very special way in the vow of poverty, of Jesus that grounds our life mission.” It is a response to Jesus’ personal invitation, “Follow me.” Fr. Sosa says, “It is not in the lack of many material goods that we recognize Jesus as poor and humble… He became poor in order to enrich us with his poverty… Jesus’ poverty is the fruit of his generosity, of his total gift of himself, so that in fellowship, we may all live in dignity as daughters and sons of the same Father…”
“This evangelical poverty [and not merely economic poverty] is what we desire when we pronounce the vow of poverty, aware that living it is only possible if we receive the grace of the Lord himself who invites us to follow him.” [So it is not possible if we just grit our teeth and will it for ourselves: the poverty that does justice is a grace, a gift, an invitation delivered in God’s time, not ours.]
All this is anchored on impulses from the Spiritual Exercises. Here, Ignatius does not intend a reflection on poverty as such, but chooses to become poor because Christ chose it. [“I desire and choose poverty with Christ Poor, rather than riches” from the Third of the Three Degrees of Humility] …
Fr. Sosa writes: “For this reason, ‘becoming poor’ as a dimension of following Jesus Christ means freeing oneself from that which prevents one from making oneself available to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. ‘Becoming poor’ is a step toward placing one’s trust in God and in Him alone.”
I’d like to end this sharing with Fr. Sosa’s citation of Pope Francis addressing GC 36: “The view of St. Ignatius [is that poverty] is not just an ascetic attitude, as if to pinch me so that it pains me more, but it is a love of poverty as a way of life, as a way of salvation, an ecclesial way. [Pope Leo XIV: as an ‘essential path to holiness’]. Because for St. Ignatius [Pope Francis says] … ‘poverty is both mother and bulwark. Poverty nurtures, mothers, generates spiritual life, a life of holiness, apostolic life. And it is a wall, it defends. How many ecclesial disasters began because of lack of poverty…? I believe St. Ignatius has a very great intuition. In the Ignatian vision of poverty we have a source of inspiration to help us’ … to help us work to change unjust social structures … so that the poor will come to realize that Jesus’ words [Dilexi te] are addressed personally to each of them: ‘I have loved you’ (Rev 3:9). As they are addressed to each of us.
On the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, mother of the Society, mother of our poverty, may she lead us to her Son, poor and humble, and guide us in our service of the poor.
Given on 1 Jan in the Oratory of St Ignatius, Loyola House of Studies, Loyola Heights, Q.C.