Pope Leo’s "Dilexi Te" Challenges Both the American Left and Right

A warning against "abstracting" the poor

Pope Leo XIV released his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te, which continues Pope Francis’s focus on the poor.

The thesis is that love and care for the poor is a central mission of the Church. Care for the poor helps us understand who Christ is and helps the poor understand who Christ is. It’s an evangelistic effort, ultimately, not purely providing for someone’s material needs.

The immediate reaction of the American church has been: How does this affect American politics? Which is predictable, since politics is our national pastime, more so than baseball ever was.

But the commentary misses something key: We must avoid “abstracting” the poor.

The Commentary

Much of the commentary from liberal Catholics has been an attitude of triumphalism. They see this exhortation as a condemnation of Donald Trump. Conservative Catholics seem to agree. They see the document as one-sided and ignore issues they care about.

I believe the Holy Father is seeking balance. As an American who grew up in our country but spent much ministry time outside the country, he has a unique perspective. In our land of prosperity, it’s easy to forget the poor. That’s true of both the right and the left. Even the left—typically seen as the “pro-poor” party—tends to see the poor as an abstract group to use as a cudgel against the right.

In reading this exhortation, I see a condemnation of both the left and the right in their treatment of the poor. This is an opportunity for Americans to reflect on their care for the poor and make necessary adjustments.

For the left, it is an opportunity to reflect whether the care for the poor is merely a means to an end. For the right, whether the left is correct in its criticism. My hope for both is that the answer is no.

Challenges for the Left

1) Treat the Poor as a Subject, Not An Object

We must overcome “the idea of social policies being a policy for the poor, but never with the poor and never of the poor, much less part of a project which can bring people back together.’” (81)

Pope Leo wants organic solutions that works with the poor to pull them out of poverty. This treats them as subjects—people who have agency in their lives—rather than objects who merely receive our aid.

The left tends towards top-down bureaucratic solutions to problems. Johnson’s Great Society designed massive programs with large bureaucracies to dole out tax dollars. Programs at this scale lack community input and the nuances needed to serve people’s individual needs. Programs from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and later the Affordable Care Act continue this mistake and make aid not only less efficient but also more expensive.

The poor are not numbers on a spreadsheet or forms in a file. They are not generic. They are persons with particular needs, and they ought to have a say in how those needs are met.

This type of aid fails to incorporate poor communities in their own revitalization. It’s imposition from above as opposed to organic from below. City or county-level aid programs would be more appropriate and more efficient at addressing these problems. There are several in my county doing fantastic work with little federal aid.

2) Work Has Intrinsic Dignity

“Saint John Paul II’s teaching on work is likewise important for our consideration of the active role that the poor ought to play in the renewal of the Church and society, thus leaving behind a certain ‘paternalism’ that limited itself to satisfying only the immediate needs of the poor.” (87)

The Church has always promoted the dignity of work. The left is somewhat pro-worker, but its policies are not pro-work.

Many on the left advocate for a Universal Basic Income, which would guarantee income for every person regardless of work. During COVID, the Democratic-led administration supplemented unemployment so much that it paid more than working. Both of these policies detach work from earning. It’s the opposite of the meritocracy error we will talk about on the right.

The left’s attitude towards work is that work is drudgery and ought not be done, that some jobs are demeaning. There’s a tendency for work to be undermined, and ideally, no one would have any work. The emphasis on welfare systems without sufficient focus on the dignity of work leads to a paternalistic attitude that assumes the poor need to be saved from their menial labor by educated elites. The left naturally looks down on those hard labor jobs and does not see the dignity in them, assuming those people should not have to do those things.

The Catholic view of work is that mankind was made to labor (Genesis 2:15) and that toil is a natural consequence of the Fall (Genesis 3:19). It is in man’s nature to work and that his work earns him wages (1 Timothy 5:18).

3) Welfare as Provisional, Not Permanent

“Welfare projects, which meet certain urgent needs, should be considered merely provisional responses.” (94)

Welfare programs in our country—instituted primarily by the left—create a system of dependency where the poor are dependent on the programs long-term.

According to a 2021 U.S. Census Bureau study, “Among individuals who began receiving means-tested government assistance, over 56% were still receiving benefits 3 years later.” A child whose parents are on welfare is twice as likely to receive welfare in adulthood. The country has spent $25 trillion on poverty, and yet our poverty rate is the same as it was in the early 1970s. The welfare programs we’ve built are permanent. And that cannot continue.

A permanent welfare state does not serve the common good. It’s bad for the country, for the taxpayer, and for the poor. A permanent turns a poor person into a de facto slave. A slave gets food, water, and shelter that are not directly tied to his work. He will only work as hard as he must.

Our welfare state provides for the needs of the poor but simultaneously pushes them out of our society. They receive its benefits but are not made participants in it.

Challenges for the Right

1) Meritocracy Is Incomplete

“Nor can it be said that most of the poor are such because they do not ‘deserve’ otherwise, as maintained by that specious view of meritocracy that sees only the successful as ‘deserving.’” (14)

Pope Leo addresses early the idea that the poor are there because they “deserve” it. This assumption goes back to the beginning of time and is sometimes adopted on the right.

Part of it is comfort. We want to believe poverty is purely a choice so we can reassure ourselves we will never be there. While some people choose poverty (as any social worker will tell you,) we are all one bad car accident or diagnosis away from destitution. Not everything is within our control.

Belief in meritocracy is a quintessentially American ideal. We believe people who work hard and do well deserve success. This is virtuous so long as it does not go to the extreme. We need to reject an absolute meritocracy that blames the poor for their situation.

Pope Leo acknowledges tacitly that, in certain circumstances, people are poor as a result of their choices—drugs, alcohol, etc. But this cannot be our concern as Christians. Our job is to help the person in front of us. You and I are not case workers allocating resources. We are people who were undeserving of the material and spiritual blessings we received, so we must go and give likewise.

2) The Market Cannot Solve Poverty

“This imbalance is the result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation... 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. Nevertheless, the dignity of every human person must be respected today, not tomorrow.” (92)

Free-market conservatives tend to place too much trust in the market. They believe so strongly in the free market that any kind of government intervention—whether regulation or social aid—is seen as immoral.

But the economic well-being of a country is not its highest good. We are a people first, not an economy, and we must take care of our people.

The Church has an understanding called “the universal destination of goods.” All temporal goods, whether owned by you or me or Blackrock, are created by God for the welfare of all people. Our God gave us a prosperous economy, not so we could grow our GDP even higher and create the first trillionaire. He gave it to us so we can do good with it.

The question the right needs to ask is: how is God calling us to use our national, state, or local wealth?

It’s a complex question, but one that needs answering.

3) We Cannot Ignore Immediate Needs

“There are those who say: ‘Our task is to pray and teach sound doctrine.’ Separating this religious aspect from integral development, they even say that it is the government’s job to care for them, or that it would be better not to lift them out of their poverty but simply to teach them to work...” (114)

The right tends to reduce Christianity to the realm of the private. It emphasizes almsgiving as a personal, not communal act. But there is a corporate action we need to do as a church. Not only does the government have a role, but the church also has a role in lifting people up out of poverty

To oversimplify things, the right tends towards “teach a man to fish” rather than the left’s “give a man a fish.” Some people are going to need one, and some people are going to need the other. Some people are going to be taught to fish. Some people are going to be given a fish so they have dinner tonight.

Both the teaching and the giving have private elements (handing a meal to a homeless man, giving a poor neighbor a job), but there are also structural elements (soup kitchens and employment non-profits). The right tends to overcorrect away from the structural. We should avoid that.

Catholics on the right should consider the balance between teaching and giving.

Moving Beyond Abstraction

The right is going to view this exhortation as an attack. The left is going to view it as a victory. But neither party has a monopoly on caring for the poor. It would be a mistake for either party to think so.

Pope Leo’s challenge to American Christians is to stop thinking of the poor as an abstract problem to be solved and instead see them as concrete persons. There is no way to know what a poor person needs unless you know the person.

This exhortation is a challenge: if you don’t know the poor, you cannot love them. Both parties should examine how well they know the poor and whether their policies actually help them.

Our shepherd’s job is to remind us of Catholic social teaching. Our job as members of the nation—or members of the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the American Solidarity Party, whatever—is to shift our political understanding to match those principles.

Despite what the left will tell you, the right is a pro-poor party. The Republicans can be a pro-poor party. The Democrats can be a pro-poor party as well.

But I think the right should focus its energy on examining its conscience and saying: are we caring for the poor? Are the policies we’re enacting in the best interest of the poor? The answer might be yes. The left will certainly disagree. Pope Leo himself might disagree. But that’s okay because virtuous hearts can disagree on complex issues.

Regardless, it would be a mistake for the right to dismiss Leo as an opponent and cede love for the poor to the left. Don’t let the one party have a monopoly on loving the poor.