Editorials - Pope Leo XIV's “Dilexi te” speaks above all of bad poverty, that is, misery and deprivation, but does not forget the beautiful poverty of the Gospel
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/10/2025
In Christian humanism, the spectrum of the word poverty is very broad. It ranges from the despair of those who suffer poverty imposed on them by others or by misfortune, to those who freely choose poverty as a path to bliss, a free choice that often becomes the main road to liberating those who have not chosen poverty. In the Church, there have always been, and still are, thousands of women and men who have made themselves poor in the hope of being called “blessed” (DT, n. 21) and who later realized that they could only hear that first beatitude of Jesus by becoming companions of those poor people who know only the dark side of poverty. If, then, this chosen poverty, this pledge of the Kingdom of Heaven, were to be eliminated from the earth by an achieved “millennium goal” (n. 10), that day would truly bring bad news for humanity, which without evangelical poverty would find itself infinitely poorer and more miserable, even if it does not know it. Pope Leo XIV's Dilexi te (DT) speaks above all of bad poverty—which we could also call misery or deprivation—to urge us to take care of it and not to “let our guard down” (n. 12), but it does not forget the beautiful poverty of the Gospel, especially in the long sections dedicated to the biblical vision of poverty.
From the Gospels and from life, we know that it is not possible to separate the Gospel view and judgment on poverty from that on wealth (no. 11). Poverty is not, in fact, an individual status, a personality trait, or “a bitter fate” (no. 14). Rather, it is a wrong relationship with people, institutions, and goods; it is a relational evil, the result of collective and individual choices made by concrete people and institutions. If there are people who find themselves, through no choice of their own, in a condition of poverty, this is deeply linked to other people and institutions that find themselves with excessive and often unjust wealth, having almost always chosen it. This is not to say that your wealth is the reason for my poverty—a thesis that is at the root of much social envy—but only to recognize the essentially relational (no. 64), social, and political nature of the poverty and wealth of men, and even more so of women (no. 12) and children. This is why it is not easy for the Church to speak of poverty and the poor, because it would be necessary to maintain a vital tension between these two dimensions of poverty—the good and the bad—because if one is left out, not only is a serious mistake made, but one departs from the Gospel. The discussion becomes even more difficult if we take the paradoxical logic of the Beatitudes to its conclusion and realize that among those poor people called “blessed” by Jesus there are not only the poor like Francis, who chose poverty, but also the poor like Job, those who simply suffered poverty. And there, we must be able to call both “blessed” without shame. “Blessed are the poor” is also the beatitude of children and of the dying.
Dilexi te is both a call to action for Christians and a meditation on poverty from the perspective of the Old and New Testaments, Paul, the Fathers, and Church tradition, with special attention to those charisms that have placed the poor and poverty at the center, Francis of Assisi (no. 64) and his many friends. It is also a reflection on the specific poverty of Jesus (nos. 20-22). It is important that this first exhortation of Pope Leo is in full continuity—even in its title, which is the twin of Dilexit nos—with Pope Francis' teaching on poverty (no. 3), the central theme of his pontificate. Pope Francis chose the place of Lazarus (Lk 16) under the table of the rich man as his vantage point on the world. From there he saw different people and things—among them prisons: no. 62—than those who look at the world sitting next to the rich man. With Dilexi te, Leone tells us that he wants to continue to look at the Church and the world together with Francis and the Lazaruses of history. And this is truly good news. The poor, he writes, “are not there by chance or by blind and bitter fate” (no. 14), and yet, he continues, “there are still those who dare to say so, showing blindness and cruelty.” It is important that Pope Leo, again in continuity with Francis, links this “blindness and cruelty” to the “false vision of meritocracy,” because this is an ideology where “it seems that only those who have been successful in life have merit” (n. 14). Therefore, meritocracy is a false vision. The meritocratic ideology is, in fact, one of the main “structures of sin” (nos. 90 ff.) that generate exclusion and then try to legitimize it ethically.
One final note. Today, there is a great secular teaching on non-chosen poverty. It comes from A. Sen, M. Yunus, Ester Duflo (three Nobel Prize winners) and many other scholars who have taught us many new things about poverty. They have shown us that poverty is a deprivation of freedom and capabilities, and is therefore an absence of capital (social, health, family, educational, etc.) that “prevents us from living the life we want to live” (A. Sen). The absence of capital manifests itself as an absence of flows (income), but it is only by taking care of capital that flows can be improved in the future. And it is to capital that “alms” (nos. 115 ff.) should therefore be directed, as the many charisms of the Church have been doing for many centuries (nos. 76 ff.), combating poverty “in capital terms” by building schools and hospitals. We hope that future papal documents will include this secular teaching on poverty, which is now essential for understanding and addressing it. And we hope that the secular world will also discover the beauty of chosen poverty. Because for the world, even for the best part of it, poverty is only an evil to be eradicated. And that is really too little.
Photo credit: © Diego Sarà
