From CNS:
Many Christians “need to go back and re-read the Gospel” because they have forgotten that faith and love for the poor go hand in hand, Pope Leo XIV said in his first major papal document.
“Love for the poor — whatever the form their poverty may take — is the evangelical hallmark of a Church faithful to the heart of God,” the pope wrote in “Dilexi Te” (“I Have Loved You”), an apostolic exhortation “to all Christians on love for the poor.”
Pope Leo signed the document Oct. 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, and the Vatican released the text Oct. 9.
The document was begun by Pope Francis, Pope Leo said, but he added to it and wanted to issue it near the beginning of his papacy “since I share the desire of my beloved predecessor that all Christians come to appreciate the close connection between Christ’s love and his summons to care for the poor.”
The connection is not new or modern and was not a Pope Francis invention, he said. In fact, throughout the Hebrew Scriptures “God’s love is vividly demonstrated by his protection of the weak and the poor, to the extent that he can be said to have a particular fondness for them.”
“Serving the poor is not a gesture to be made ‘from above’, but an encounter between equals, where Christ is revealed and adored… Therefore, when the Church bends down to care for the poor, she assumes her highest posture.”
“I am convinced that the preferential choice for the poor is a source of extraordinary renewal both for the Church and for society,” Pope Leo wrote, “if we can only set ourselves free of our self-centeredness and open our ears to their cry.”
As he has done from the beginning of his papacy in May, the pope decried the increasing gap between the world’s wealthiest and poorest citizens and noted how women often are “doubly poor,” struggling to feed their children and doing so with few rights or possibilities.
Pope Leo also affirmed church teaching since at least the 1960s that there are “structures of sin” that keep the poor in poverty and lead those who have sufficient resources to ignore the poor or think they are better than them.
