Love for the Poor and the Church's Great Tradition

A Second Reflection on Pope Leo XIV's Dilexi Te

In my first reflection on Pope Leo XIV’s recent apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te, I explained that the document is “a theological meditation on God’s ‘preferential’ love for the poor (#16) and its sacramental embodiment in the Church.” Reaffirming Pope Francis’s call for “a Church which is poor and for the poor” (#35), Leo insists that the Church is not just called to serve the poor, but also to embody a simpler, less worldly identity. I focused especially on the third chapter of the document which offers a lengthy history of the efforts of numerous Catholics over the centuries to accompany the poor. Although the word “synodality” is not used in Dilexi Te, I argued that this chapter in particular is nevertheless meant to emphasize that Catholics with all types of vocations and gifts have contributed to the Church’s mission of love for the poor.

In that same reflection, I noted that it would be impossible for me to summarize every noteworthy strand in Dilexi Te. Since then, others have filled in some of the gaps. For example, writing here at Substack, Paul Fahey tackles the theme of the preferential option for the poor in the document, arguing that the preferential option as presented in Dilexi Te is not simply a moral exhortation, but a vision of the Church’s presence in the world. Paul Chu, writing at Where Peter Is, further explores a point I only briefly raised, contrasting Pope Leo’s vision of a poor Church with that of some conservative Catholics in the United States, for example those affiliated with the Napa Institute. And writing at Commonweal, David Lantigua explores the document’s indebtedness to the Latin American Church. For example, the theological concept of the preferential option for the poor was first proposed by Latin American liberation theologians. In Dilexi Te’s fourth chapter, Pope Leo highlights the important role of the Episcopal Conference of Latin America’s role in developing the Church’s social teaching and its understanding of the preferential option for the poor, particularly through the conference’s gatherings in Medellín, Puebla, Santo Domingo, and Aparecida.

For my own part, in this second reflection on Dilexi Te, I want to highlight the role of Tradition in the document. I’m certainly not the only reader to note Dilexi Te’s emphasis on Tradition; for example, Mark Brumley writes: “In many respects, Dilexi te is a document of tradition—drawing on many streams and synthesizing them to reflect Catholic teaching about and love of God’s poor.” Pope Leo himself draws our attention to the theme of Tradition in the document: “[C]aring for the poor is part of the Church’s great Tradition, a beacon as it were of evangelical light to illumine the hearts and guide the decisions of Christians in every age” (#103). As I noted last week, however, Pope Leo is not simply repeating old teachings in Dilexi Te, but also adding his voice—however subtly—to ongoing discussions in the Church. In this case, I would argue that Leo is encouraging us to reconsider how the theological term Tradition is often used in today’s ecclesial debates and to think more imaginatively about what the Church’s Tradition entails.

---

In today’s Catholic Church, traditionalists make up an important and influential group among the faithful. That being said, “traditionalist” is a vaguely defined category and it overlaps considerably with that of those Catholics who could be identified as “conservative,” the latter of which may be the broader category. For example, a Catholic who belongs to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement may easily identify as a conservative Catholic, but I might hesitate to consider them a traditionalist. Even so, perhaps the most important defining characteristic of Catholics who identify as “traditionalist” is a preference for the Traditional Latin Mass or the Tridentine Mass, namely the Mass outlined in the 1962 Missal, published before the promulgation of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, in 1963 and the new Missal incorporating its teachings in 1969. While some traditionalists simply have a preference for the older liturgy, others consider the post-Vatican II liturgy a mistake and believe the Church as a whole should return to the earlier liturgy.

A second distinguishing characteristic of Catholic traditionalists is uneasiness with the fruits of Vatican II. Catholic traditionalists often look at the dissent from magisterial authority, creeping relativism, irreverent liturgies, changing sexual norms among Catholics, diminishing vocations to the priesthood and religious life in the contemporary Catholic Church as signs that the teachings of the Second Vatican Council were at best ambiguous. This conclusion distinguishes traditionalists from other Catholics who might identify as “conservative” who might lament these same trends but see them as reflecting a betrayal of the council’s authentic teachings in the post-conciliar period. The more radical among the traditionalists (often called “rad trads”), on the other hand, are more likely to consider the council’s teachings (for example, on religious liberty and salvation for non-Catholics) outright heretical; rad trads may belong to, or be sympathetic to, groups such as the Society of St. Pius X.

Finally, theologically inclined traditionalists are likely to hold to a “hermeneutic of continuity” when it comes to interpreting the Church’s magisterial teachings, insisting that recent teachings should be understood in light of older teachings. They are likely, therefore, to be uneasy about the notion of the development of doctrine. For this reason, among others, Pope Francis’s pontificate was polarizing for many traditionalists, because of his openness to communion for the divorced and remarried in Amoris Laetitia, his insistence that the Church should be more welcoming to LGBT persons, and his revision of the Catechism stating that the death penalty is “inadmissible,” all of which were seen as departing from the Church’s traditional teachings. Of course, Francis’s publication of Traditionis Custodes, the apostolic letter significantly limiting the use of the Traditional Latin Mass, was also seen as a hostile act by many traditionalists.

These remarks are not meant to be a comprehensive overview of traditionalism in the contemporary Catholic Church, and someone might object to this or that point I’ve raised in trying to describe the movement. My purpose is simply to identify that an influential segment of the Catholic population identifies itself as defending the Church’s Tradition against not only the encroachment of the secular world, but also against “progressives” in the Church who seek to depart from Tradition in the name of the development of doctrine. The proper understanding of Tradition, then, is a crucial flashpoint in the Catholic Church today.

This is why I think that Pope Leo’s appeal to Tradition in Dilexi Te is so significant. He seems to be challenging the identification of Tradition solely with the preoccupations of traditionalists: the liturgy, sexual morality, magisterial authority, etc. In Dilexi Te, Leo insists that the preferential option for the poor, an idea more typically identified with “progressive” Catholics, is also an integral part of the Church’s Tradition. One might say the document calls into question the supposition that one side in the Church’s culture wars “owns” Tradition and invites Catholics to think of Tradition in a new way.

A month ago, I argued that Pope Francis seemed to embrace the role of provocateur, “to awaken the Church from habitual ways of thinking and acting where further dialogue and creativity were needed,” and contrasted that with Leo’s more subdued and cautious approach to leadership. But here Leo himself is being a bit of a provocateur, even if in a subtle way. Indeed, some Catholic traditionalists on social media have reacted to Dilexi Te by seeing it as conclusive proof that Leo is a “progressive” pope in the line of Francis, and not the pope they had been hoping for who would steer the Church back in a more traditional direction. On the other hand, I’m sure some Catholics who identify as traditionalists embrace the Church’s commitment to the poor, including its social teaching, as part of the Tradition they defend, and so hopefully Dilexi Te can spur a more fruitful dialogue about Tradition in the Church that expands beyond the issues mentioned above which are so often equated with Tradition.

At the same time, I hope Dilexi Te helps encourage progressive Catholics to rethink the way they think about the Church’s Tradition, as well. I’ve written before about how traditionalist and progressive Catholics alike have too easily been convinced that Vatican II and the theological developments surrounding it represent a rupture in the Church’s Tradition, when in fact a closer study of the Tradition shows a more organic development. For example, I’ve written about how Vatican II’s teaching on the salvation of non-Christians is in greater continuity with earlier theological thinking than many realize.

Mother Teresa

---

That being said, despite Pope Leo’s emphasis on the place of love for the poor in “the Church’s great Tradition” (#103), he nevertheless signals that a significant development in the Church’s understanding of poverty and the poor did take place in the twentieth century. Nathan Turowsky notes this, pointing out that even though Dilexi Te “is a tour de force of ecclesiastical history, showing how, at every point, what we now call the ‘preferential option for the poor’ has reflected what the Church has believed about the Divine persons and Divine love,” nevertheless “Pope Leo does see something providential about Catholic social teaching as having developed in our time, our era, our living memory.”

In particular, Pope Leo identifies the Second Vatican Council as “a milestone in the Church’s understanding of the poor in God’s saving plan” (#84) because of its identification of the Church and its mission with the poor. As I noted last week, Leo highlights Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro’s speech at the council calling for a new image of the Church embracing Christ’s poverty as a turning point, alongside interventions by Popes John XXIII and Paul VI to similar effect. Leo also points to the council’s social teaching, particularly in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. Despite this particular emphasis on Vatican II, however, Leo insists that the Church’s modern social teaching was a watershed, bringing “new insights refined through a process of ecclesial discernment” (#83) to the challenges of the modern world.

Although these new insights emerged from deep reflection on the Church’s Tradition, they were likewise a response to the modern context, what Leo refers to as “The acceleration of technological and social change in the past two centuries, with all its contradictions and conflicts” (#82). Catholic social teaching, therefore, was a response to what Gaudium et Spes refers to as the “signs of the times” (#4), the challenges and opportunities facing humanity that demand discernment and action from the Church.

Leo’s reference to the “acceleration of technological and social change” in the modern world offers a clue as to what makes this development in the Church’s Tradition so significant. One of the defining characteristics of modernity is the emergence of humankind’s capacity to reshape society and its institutions, a capacity that arose in tandem with the scientific and technological ability to investigate and dominate nature. Gaudium et Spes captures this transformation well:

Today’s spiritual agitation and the changing conditions of life are part of a broader and deeper revolution. As a result of the latter, intellectual formation is ever increasingly based on the mathematical and natural sciences and on those dealing with man himself, while in the practical order the technology which stems from these sciences takes on mounting importance.

This scientific spirit has a new kind of impact on the cultural sphere and on modes of thought. Technology is now transforming the face of the earth, and is already trying to master outer space. To a certain extent, the human intellect is also broadening its dominion over time: over the past by means of historical knowledge; over the future, by the art of projecting and by planning.

Advances in biology, psychology, and the social sciences not only bring men hope of improved self-knowledge; in conjunction with technical methods, they are helping men exert direct influence on the life of social groups. (#5)

It must be stated that Catholic social teaching has repeatedly rejected this modern desire to reshape society in its more extreme forms, which treat human nature as completely malleable. This includes, for example, the totalitarian impulse in communism to create a “New Man” through social revolution or technocratic attempts to construct a utopia through behavioristic control or, potentially, genetic engineering. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Caritas in Veritate, “Our nature, constituted not only by matter but also by spirit, and as such, endowed with transcendent meaning and aspirations, is also normative for culture” (#48).

Even so, the emergence of modern Catholic social teaching represents the hope that society and its institutions can be transformed for the better. For example, Pope Pius XI’s 1931 social encyclical Quadragesimo Anno—in many ways a quite conservative document—is subtitled “On Reconstruction of the Social Order,” revealing the conviction that, not only has modern society been constructed through human endeavor, but also that it should be rebuilt along more Christian principles. This is a dramatic change from only a century earlier, when the Catholic Church was a reactionary defender of the ancien régime, which represented the natural order of things.

In Dilexi Te, Pope Leo recognizes that concomitant with this capacity of humankind to transform society is the insight that poverty is not simply part of the nature of things. We can identify the causes of poverty and alleviate them. For example, he writes, “The poor are not there by chance or by blind and cruel fate. Nor, for most of them, is poverty a choice” (#14). He adds, “We need to be increasingly committed to resolving the structural causes of poverty” (#94). Later he explains, “Unjust structures need to be recognized and eradicated by the force of good, by changing mindsets but also, with the help of science and technology, by developing effective policies for societal change” (#97). He resists the “ideological prejudice” that the free market is sufficient to lift people out of poverty, as if concerted efforts to address poverty’s structural causes would unduly interfere with a natural state of affairs: “There is no shortage of theories attempting to justify the present state of affairs or to explain that economic thinking requires us to wait for invisible market forces to resolve everything” (#92).

Pope Leo highlights how the concept of “social sin” or “structures of sin”—first introduced by Latin American liberation theologians and the Latin American bishops and incorporated into the Church’s social teaching by Popes John Paul II and Francis—is crucial to the Church’s response to poverty today. He notes that the Latin American bishops, at their 1979 gathering in Puebla, Mexico, acknowledged that poverty is a social sin caused by “structures of injustice” (#90). In other words, poverty is the result of sinful acts of exploitation and indifference built up institutionally over time. He goes on to write:

In his Encyclical Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis reminded us that social sin consolidates a “structure of sin” within society, and is frequently “part of a dominant mindset that considers normal or reasonable what is merely selfishness and indifference. This then gives rise to social alienation.” It then becomes normal to ignore the poor and live as if they do not exist. It then likewise seems reasonable to organize the economy in such a way that sacrifices are demanded of the masses in order to serve the needs of the powerful. (#93)

Since the structural causes of poverty are spiritually rooted in sin, the Church has something to offer in addition to advocating for solutions to those structural causes. Pope Leo writes, “Charity has the power to change reality; it is a genuine force for change in history. It is the source that must inspire and guide every effort to ‘resolve the structural causes of poverty,’ and to do so with urgency” (#91). An approach to alleviating poverty guided by charity means treating the poor as “subjects” rather than “objects” (#100). Likewise, near the end of the document, he writes, “For Christians, the poor are not a sociological category, but the very ‘flesh’ of Christ” (#110). For this reason, the rich can be evangelized by their encounter with the poor (#109).

Although Pope Leo insists that the recognition that poverty’s causes can be alleviated represents a “milestone” in the Church’s thinking, Dilexi Te shows that this is an authentic development of the Church’s Tradition rather than a modern novelty. For one, several of the individuals and groups identified in Leo’s history of Catholic service to the poor, such as the Benedictine monks, the founders of Catholic hospitals, and the founders of Catholic schools for the poor, created institutional responses to the poor, in many cases institutions that attempted to address the conditions that contributed to poverty. Second, many of these Catholics, like the early Franciscans and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, responded to the poor as subjects and not merely objects of charity, to use Pope Leo’s more modern language. The poor have active spiritual lives of their own and can bring Christ to others, not least those who are serving them. It is only a small step to the conviction that the struggle against poverty, as an impulse of Christian charity, is not simply “for the poor,” but “with the poor” and “of the poor” (#81).

Although the primary purpose of Dilexi Te is undoubtedly to reaffirm the Catholic Church’s commitment to the love of the poor and to ground that commitment in both doctrine and Tradition, I think Pope Leo is also attempting to shake up how we think about Tradition. Tradition is not simply the preserve of Catholic traditionalists but also includes aspects of the faith, like the preferential option for the poor, dear to progressive Catholics, as well. At the same time, Pope Leo does acknowledge an important modern development in the Church’s understanding of poverty, namely the recognition that poverty is not simply part of the nature of things but rather has social causes. Therefore, as Christians, we have a responsibility to alleviate those causes. This development, however, is not a novelty, but instead emerges authentically from the Church’s Tradition and its faithfulness to the God “who hears the cry of the poor and intervenes to free them” (#17).