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Joe does a deep dive into Pope Leo’s first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to share with you some of the things that struck me about Pope Leo’s new apostolic exportation, dilexi te. Now, I want to say a couple of things at the outset. First, a little bit about what the document is. Second, a little bit about what this is going to be. The first thing to know is that dilexi te is an apostolic exhortation. In other words, it’s not laying out church doctrine per se, the way a papal encyclical does.
Rather it’s taking things we already know or should know and exhorting us, encouraging us. And so that’s the nature of what an apostolic exploitation is. So sometimes people have read this document and said, we already know this stuff, come on, but it’s like, yeah, but go do it. That’s the nature of it. A lot of this is stuff that we know or should know already. I found there were a lot of points where I’d never heard a particular quote before or there was a way of phrasing things that I thought was really striking or really challenging in a good way. But it’s not going to be something where you say, oh, I didn’t realize I was supposed to care for the poor as a Christian. Hopefully, hopefully a lot of this feels familiar, but it is nevertheless a good thing to be challenged about. Second, it is sort of a companion document and Pope Leo makes it very clear that he’s taking a draft that was already worked on by Pope Francis and then adding his own kind of commentary on it.
In fact, I think we should view this as sort of a companion document to something Pope Francis wrote or issued last year called Deluxe No, which was on the sacred heart Deluxe no means he loved us. It’s coming from St. Paul’s description of Christ in Romans eight. Deluxe te means I have loved you and significantly here it’s from Revelation chapter three about how the poor are beloved by Christ and those who are powerless in the world are beloved by Christ. And Pope Leo then connects this with the magnifico, which if you pray the liturgy of the hours we pray every evening at Vespers, and which Mary talks about how God has cast on the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly, how he’s filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty. Now those words are very challenging and putting them in this context I think is really important that we don’t just care for the poor because we have something and they don’t or because we see someone in need.
All of those are good reasons, but also because if we don’t, we will be cast down, we will be judged, we will be damned. And this is something that maybe we don’t talk about as Christians. I’ve heard a lot of homilies kind of excusing wealth in a very wealthy country saying, oh, well it’s not being wealthy, it’s a problem, it’s just being greedy. But there is in fact this sense in which Jesus can say, woe to you rich, and if we’ve lost some of that edge in the gospel proclamation, this is a good reminder. We need to be exhorted to reclaim it. So as I say, Pope Leo is very clear that this is something Pope Francis had been preparing in the last months of his life and it’s a companion to, as I say, deluxe no, and Leo is now making the document his own.
So he is taking the draft, Francis began and then adding his own kind of reflections in his own words, and I think you can since that pretty clearly in the document, there are parts where I think it’s fair to speculate, oh, that reads like Pope Francis. This has a very familiar kind of voice and tone. So if you’re looking for what is a leonine encyclical or apostolic exploitation look like, this one’s a little bit, it’s too soon to say we saw the same thing when Pope Francis became Pope and he continued the draft of something become by Benedict the 16th. And this is actually a fairly common occurrence. If one pope has begun some magisterial work and another and then he dies and the next Pope sees something in there that’s really good, they might take it and then maybe take it in a slightly different direction, but it can be really beneficial.
But if you’re waiting to hear what Leo sounds like, I’m not sure this is that. It is nevertheless really good and really important and Leo says as much that he continues this project because he considers it essential to insist on this path to holiness. Now, I like that framing. He’s not just saying we should care for the poor out of social justice or economic equality or something like that, but because we actually want to strive for holiness. So as I say, I’m going to share with you the things that struck me. I’m not going to do line by line paragraph by paragraph. I’m not even going to go entirely in order. I’ve got a few places where I’m going to diverge from the order. Instead, I’m really just going to share things that I found striking and things that you might find striking as well, beginning with this absolute deluge of patristic citations, and I mean that in a good way.
I know it can sound like, oh, there are a bunch of citations. There are, but with this very clear point of saying this is the mission of the church for 2000 years to proclaim the gospel, including preaching the good news to the poor and actually doing something to help the condition of those who are poor and downtrodden. And we get into why that’s the case, but let’s start with the fact that it is the case. Let’s start with the fact this is not some new preoccupation of the church. This is not some 21st century social justice-y kind of political thing. This is the perennial teaching and practice of the church. So Pope Leo goes all the way back to people like Saint Ignatius of Antioch and his letter to the Serian and warns about those who have a different opinion with respect to the grace of Christ which has come to us, how opposed they’re to the will of God and to show that they’re opposed to the will of God.
He says they have no regard for love, no care for the widow or the orphan or the oppressed of the bound or of the free of the hungry or of the thirsty like a person who behaves in that way who’s indifferent to the downtrodden Ignatius points to that as just obvious proof that they don’t understand the grace of God and that they’re opposed to the will of God. That’s striking. Similarly, St. Paul Carpo Smyrna, the bishop of the church Ignatius had been writing to in that prior letter and talks about the need for presbyters elders, priests to be compassionate and merciful to all bringing back those that wander, visiting all the sick and not neglecting the widow, the orphan or the poor, but always providing for that which is becoming in the sight of God and man. So there is this special duty of course for clergy to have this real love for the poor and downtrodden and a lot of times this is connected in things that the church fathers would write about the Eucharist, which is a fascinating connection that is referenced a few times in the document and frankly I wish it was spelled out maybe a little more there is a liturgical connection.
I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this and I actually have been thinking about doing an episode covering this. I’ll just throw this idea out there and maybe cover it in greater depth later. The offertory, you bring forward the bread and the wine and the water which are going to become the Eucharist, but you’ll also bring forward the money to give to the poor and this is also part of the sacrifice of the church and the mass and say just martyr in describing what happens in Sunday. Worship talks about this at one point, paragraph 67. He says, then all rise together and pray and this is after the readings and the gospel and the homily and when our prayers ended, bread and wine and water are brought and the president it means presider and like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings according to his ability and the people as sent saying amen.
And there’s a distribution to each and a participation of that over which things have been given. In other words, the Eucharist, if you look at the Greek, the Eucharist, bread and wine and those who are absent, a portion is sent by the deacons. Okay? That’s about the Eucharistic practice and then the very next line he says in they who are well to do and willing give, what each thinks fit and what is collected is deposited with the president. Again, the presider who suckers the orphans and widows and those who through sickness or any other cow are in want and those who are in bonds and the stranger to sojourning among us and in a word takes care of all who are in need. So you see this coupling in Justin Marty. You see this coupling actually frequently in the fathers between the spiritual needs being met in the Eucharist and the physical needs being met with the tithe offering, which I think is really fascinating and as I say, I’d love to see more kind of exploring of this dimension, the kind of bringing together of the resources of the church to care for the rest of the body.
This is one interesting part of what it means for us to be truly in communion with one another is that we take care of one another. And so having a communion brought about through the Eucharist, but that doesn’t translate into caring for the poor and downtrodden within our communion is an incomplete communion to say the least. Okay? There’s a couple figures that are especially highlighted in the patristic overview here. St. John Chris System St Augustine, and although he doesn’t have his own section title, St Ambrose of Milan gets some excellent shout outs as well. Let’s start with St. John Chris system.
If you’ve ever read St. John Chris system, he’s got really challenging stuff on the care for the poor and he has really strong words for the rich and comfortable and it’s good to know this is in the spiritual tradition of the church. It is good to know this is part of our spiritual patrimony because if I just said these things, you might think, oh, that person is very presumptuous, or Hey, he’s got a bone to pick with rich people or something like that. But hearing it built on the gospel by the church fathers is I think challenging in a way that’s harder to escape from. In particular, he has in view those of us who might have a love for liturgical finery without having a love for the poor, and I say those of us because I see myself in some of his words of critique that if I’m not careful I can slide into this where I want to see the upbuilding of beautiful churches and beautiful liturgy and beautiful vestments and beautiful vessels and everything else, but do I want to see the broken body of Christ taken care of in the beggar outside the church?
If I don’t woe to me or in St. John Chris system’s words, he says, let no Judas then approach this table. No Simon nay for both these perish through covetousness. Let us flee then from this gulf. Neither let us account it enough for our salvation. If after we have stripped widows and orphans, we offer for this table a golden jeweled cup. So if you defraud the poor and then spend that money on liturgical finery, that’s not going to be good for your salvation. Now you might say, well, I’m not defrauding the poor. I’m just very wealthy and he’s going to say, well then you’re defrauding the poor and we’ll get into that in a second, but he goes on to say no. If you desire to honor the sacrifice, the eucharistic sacrifice all for your soul for which also it was slain caused that to become golden, but if that remained worse than lead or potter’s clay, while the vessel is of gold, what’s the profit?
If you’ve got a impure soul, having pure vessels isn’t going to do anything. Let not this be our, not this therefore be our aim to offer golden vessels only but to do so from honest earnings. Likewise. Now notice there, I think this is a passage that is sometimes misused by people. Saint John Christ is not saying, don’t have nice liturgical elements, don’t have nice liturgical vestments and vessels and churches and so on. You will find people who take him in that way. That’s not what he’s saying here because he’s saying just don’t only do that and he’s actually going to stress this so he doesn’t have a problem with the golden vessels. He has a problem with the golden vessels when the poor are lying neglected and he says, would you do honor to Christ’s body neglect him? Not when naked do not while here you honor him with silicon garments, neglect him perishing without of cold and nakedness like to say, we need the golden patent and the chalice jewels because this is the body and blood of Christ good, but don’t then turn to see Christ’s broken body in the poor and say, yeah, cardboard and rags is good enough that rather this love we show to the body of Christ should carry over to how we greet the body of Christ in the poor in the least of these for he that said, this is my body and by his word confirm the fact this same said you saw me and hungered and fed me not and in as much as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me for this indeed needs not coverings but a pure soul, but that requires much attention.
In other words, Christ’s eucharistic body isn’t actually going to be harmed if you don’t get the most expensive golden patent. Now again, don’t mishear him. He’s not saying put Christ on cardboard plates, but he is saying, don’t let our love of liturgical finery keep us from the concrete spiritual needs of the least of these who we’re told we’re going to be judged for how we treat or ignore, right? If you just say, I’m not going to do anything, that’s not my call, I’m not going to do that. Then when you hear him say, you didn’t do this for me when you didn’t do for the least of these, just know you made that choice consciously. That’s criticism’s point. He says, let us learn therefore to be strict in life and to honor Christ as he himself desires for to him who is honored that honor is most pleasing, which it is his own will to have, not that which we account best.
In other words, if you want to worship God, worship him the way he wants to be worshiped, honor him the way he wants to be honored. It doesn’t do any good to say you’re going to honor him by doing the opposite of what he tells you to do. And he gives the example of St. Peter telling Jesus, oh, don’t wash my feet. Peter thought he was doing a favor to Jesus by showing his honor form, by resisting the thing Jesus had said and he had to be set straight. His intention was good. He wasn’t trying to be rude to Christ. He wasn’t trying to say like, oh gross, don’t touch me. No, he was saying, I’m not worthy to have you wash my feet. And yet it was a higher honoring of Christ to do the thing Jesus told him to do, which in this case was to have his feet wash. Well, similarly he says, even so do thou honor him with dishonor, which he ordained spending your wealth on poor people since God has no need at all of golden vessels but of golden souls, but this is a more pressing need.
But then again, he stresses these things I say not forbidding such offerings to be provided. In other words, he just said God doesn’t need golden vessels and in a literal sense that’s quite true. Jesus isn’t going to be harmed if you don’t use a golden patent. That’s not going to happen or golden saum or whatever, but he’s very clear to say that very next line, I’m not telling you not to do that. I’m just telling you that you’re required together with them and before them to give alms for God accepts indeed the former but much more the latter for if the one, excuse me for in the one the offer alone is profited, but in the other the receiver also, so this is an interesting point that when we have good liturgy, when we have the gold and everything else, this is to honor God, but God isn’t improved by it.
We are because we are having right relationship with him in terms of external trappings, but when you serve the poor, both you and the person you’re serving are improved by it. So you can’t actually improve Christ’s lot in the Eucharist. He’s the perfect sufficient sacrifice, but you can improve Christ’s lot in the poor by caring for him in the least of these that in the same way that when St. Paul is persecuting the church, Jesus can say, why do you persecute me? Christ is suffering in the poor in a way he’s not suffering in the Eucharist. I hope that’s a clear distinction. And so Saint John Christ warns that if you just do the liturgical thing, the act seems to be a ground even of ostentation, but there all is merciful and love to man, so it’s spiritually safer in a certain way to focus on caring for the poor.
It says for what is the prophet when his table indeed is full of golden cups, but he with hunger first fill him being hungered and then abundantly deck out his table. Also, do you make him a cup of gold while you give him not a cup of cold water? I love that line that if you won’t give the beggar on the street a cup of water, but then you want to give Christ a chalice, then you failed to recognize Christ when he met you in the beggar on the street because otherwise you would see the absurdity of trying to offer him a golden chalice and then refusing him the cup of cold water and what is the prophet do you furnish his table’s claws but spangled with gold while to himself he afford not even the necessary covering and when good comes of it for tell me should you see one at a loss for necessary food and Amit appeasing his hunger while you first overlaid his table with silver, would he indeed thank you and not rather be indignant?
Imagine you see someone hungry and you say, I’m not going to feed you, but I’m going to give you this incredibly elaborate table covering. It’s going to be beautiful, but you’re going to go hungry at it. Same on Christ is saying this is effectively what we’re doing to Christ because we are decking out the church’s beautifully, but we’re not caring for the poor. What again, if C one wrapped in rags and stiff with cold, you should neglect giving him a garment and build golden column saying that you were doing him in honor. Would he not say that you were mocking and accounted an insult and the most extreme insult? So I think that’s again, it’s a powerful thing. I remember the first time I discovered all of this in St. John Chris system being like, wow, this is very challenging. I didn’t realize the church fathers spoke this adamantly and provocatively on our care for the poor, but he’s not alone in this.
I want to share a few other things that Leo shares. I’ve actually taken the citations Leo gives and I’m given a little more of the context here just to spend a little more time with these quotes, but I’d love that he’s mentioning this and bringing this treasure house of wisdom to bear on the question because it is something that’s easy to overlook or forget, but he says, let this then be your thought with regard to Christ. Also, when he is going about as a wanderer and a stranger needing a roof to cover him and now neglecting to receive him dickus out a pavement and walls and capitals of columns and hangs up the silver chains by means of lamps but himself found in prison, you will not even look upon. That’s something that we need to be very cautious. Are we doing that? Are we imagining we’re giving our best to God because our churches look nice and we’re willing to support that or our worship looks nice or whatever the case is, but we’re not honoring Christ in the poor of the downtrodden, the prisoner, the stranger and so on.
Leo commenting on this says consequently, charity is not optional. Rather it is a requirement of true worship. Chris system vehemently denounced excessive wealth connected with indifference for the poor. The attention due to them rather than a mere social requirement is a condition for salvation which gives unjust wealth, a condemnatory weight when people are starving to death and you are hoarding wealth, you are incurring damnation. That is what he’s warning you and there’s good patristic support for this good biblical support for this Chris is Tim goes on to say, when you see a poor man, do not hurry by but immediately reflect what you would’ve been had you been he, what would you not have wished that all should do for you? And this is really what, this is a golden rule, but it is a good reminder. It’s very easy if your life has gone well to look at somebody who’s in a rough spot and just look at them with an air of condemnation or sort of a disgust, a desire to just avoid the distressing disguise of the poor as Mother Teresa put it that we can forget that there, but for the grace of God go I and how would I want to be treated in that context?
Christ goes on to say, reflect that he’s a free man like yourself for freedom. Christ set is free and he shares the same noble birth with you and possesses all things in common with you, and yet oftentimes he’s not on a level even with your dogs. On the contrary, while they are satiated, he often lies sleeps hungry and the free man has become less honorable than your slaves. The poor have been redeemed by Christ in this radical way and yet we treat them beneath how we would treat a slave or a dog.
But then he says something really fascinating, which we’re going to get into later about treating the poor not simply as objects of mercy but recognizing in them subjects of mercy, people who are also capable of sharing the gospel in Christ’s words, but they the poor perform needful services for you. What are these? Do they serve you? Well, suppose that I show this, the poor man two performs needful services for you far greater than they do, for he will stand by you in the day of judgment, meaning far greater than the dog or the slave for he’ll stand by you in the day of judgment and we’ll deliver you from the fire.
I quite like that, that we are bringing monetary wealth to the poor and the poor are bringing salvation to those of us who are comfortable. And how amazing oftentimes you adorned with vestments, innumerable of varied colors and rot with gold, a dead body and sensible, no longer perceiving the honor I believe here He’s talking about putting beautiful vestments and adorning the bodies of the saints in terms of relics and everything else. And he says, while that which is in pain, the body that is in pain and lamenting and tormented interacts by hunger and frost, you neglect give us more to VA glory than to the fear of God. So yes, by all means serve the bodies of the saints, honor them, but also honor the body of Christ and the poor. The frost is hard and the poor man is cast out in rags, nearly dead with his teeth, chattering both by his looks and his air fitted to move you and you pass by warm and full of drink.
And how do you expect that God should deliver you when in misfortune? That’s what I mean when I say he presents this with this condemnatory weight. If you don’t do this, if you ignore Christ in the poor, what do you think is going to happen when you need something from God after you have spurned and rejected him? If you’re unrepentant of that, if your heart is closed to the poor, what are you expecting to happen him that has done you no wrong? You are able to deliver him, you neglect. How shall he God forgive you, who’s sitting against him is not this deserving of hell? When we pray, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and we ask that the measure by which we measure it out to others is measured out to us. We often think about this just in that literal level of if someone sends against me, do I say I forgive you.
But the deeper point there is how we treat others is going to be the guide by which we are ourselves treated. And so if we are contemptuous of others, if we see others in peril, in need of earthly salvation, in the sense of being poor and hungry and thirsty in the rest and we are capable of delivering them and we don’t deliver them, how are we going to be delivered from the spiritual salvation that we need or to the spiritual salvation that we need from the spiritual peril? And if we’re not, then we end up in hell. That’s his point. Behold, this is from ly Cho un Lazarus. He says, behold then it is said the man in his works. This also is robbery not to impart our good things to others. Very likely. It may seem to you a strange saying, wonder not at it.
For I will from the divine scriptures, bring testimony showing the none, only robbery of other men’s goods, but also the not imparting our own good things to others that this also is robbery and covetousness and fraught. If you heard all this and thought, well, I don’t rip off poor people, I just don’t give them my stuff because it’s my stuff. St. John Christ says not good enough. And he says it in the context of preaching on Lazarus and the rich man, if you remember the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, that was the rich man’s attitude. He didn’t rip off Lazarus, he didn’t defraud him his wages, he just didn’t take care of him and that was enough to send him to hell. Why? Well St. John Kristin argues because our Lord’s things, they are from whensoever. We may obtain them.
Everything you have, everything you’ve ever done, you owe to God the gifts and talents you have, you got those from God. Even if you use them well, you were given the natural aptitude and the divine grace that you needed to achieve everything you’ve ever achieved in your life. Nothing you have comes simply from you. You don’t come simply from you. So when he says, everything we have belongs to God, this isn’t just some pious platitude, this is strictly true and for this, it is that God has permitted you to possess much. Not that you should spend it in fornication and drunkenness and gluttony and rich clothing or in any other mode of luxury, but that you should distribute it to the needy that the people who have more have it to take care of their neighbors. This is at the heart of a problem many people have.
They’ll say there’s two different problems that are really the same problem. One is they’ll notice something like the inequality of wealth or the inequality of talents. Some people are born into very comfortable life circumstances. Some people are born into misery and poverty and neglect and lack and everything else. And we can say, that doesn’t seem fair. How is that fair? That’s problem one. Problem two is the same thing, but in the spiritual life these people have all of these graces. They don’t struggle with these temptations. They have a good education, good formation, divine grace seems to carry them along. How is that fair when there’s other people in the world who don’t know about the gospel, who’ve maybe heard the gospel in ways that are warped and distorted and maybe they heard about the gospel from people who are horrible hypocrites and predators and everything else, and they’ve given a horrible name to Christianity and these people over here haven’t heard the gospel at all or have heard a corrupted version.
How is that fair? And part of the answer to those questions is one and the same that those who have much are given it to use on those who don’t have much or don’t have as much, that those who are needy should benefit from those who have much. This is a really central point that your gifts and talents, this is everything from your natural aptitudes, the things that you were just good at to the divine graces that God has given you to yes, the money and other means, God has given you. Those things are not simply for your own private enjoyment. Those are not simply things to use on yourself and particularly on sin, right? If you’ve been given the ability to present ideas clearly, you should probably do something like evangelization or apologetics, not just use it to get your way to build up a little empire to yourself, or if you are really good at singing, you could use it as becoming a diva or you could use it to proclaim the glory of God.
If you have a lot of money, you can build a little monument to yourself, a beautiful house out in the suburbs, or you can build up a monument to Christ by serving the poor. That I think is the point that St. John Christ is making and he gives this example that I think is a very good way to think about everything you have. He imagines a tax collector having in charge the king’s property. That tax collector doesn’t have the authority to just spend all the tax money on himself, and if he did, he would be in a lot of trouble. Or if you had an almanar, someone who was meant to take the king’s money and serve it on the poor and he used it on himself instead, he would be in a lot of trouble. And this is what he says is true of us, that the rich man is basically the almanor of God, the person who gives alms on behalf of God to the poor. If he then should spend upon himself more than he really needs, he will pay hereafter a heavy penalty for the things he has are not his own, but are the things of his fellow servants. Incredible, very challenging.
That’s St. John Christ. I want to move now to the western fathers to three of them actually. The first one is Pope St. Gregory, the great Pope Leo talks about how when the church is kind of collapsing, imperial institutions were collapsing under the pressure of the barbarian invasion. So you’ve got this period that’s the dawn of what becomes known as the dark ages according to the enlightenment folks, but you really do see a societal collapse. The Roman empire falls apart, barbarian invaders conquer a lot of the Western Roman empire. The east is indifferent and doesn’t come to the aid of the West. When all of that is happening, Pope St and Gregory reminds the faithful every minute we can find a Lazarus if we seek him and every day even without seeking, we find one at our door. Now, beggar’s besiege us imploring K noms later they will be our advocates.
Therefore, do not the opportunity of doing works of mercy, do not store unused the good things you possess. He then called up the fact that many times it’s not just that we don’t want to part with our money to the poor person because we’re greedy or covetous, but also that we might judge the poor person. And so he says, whenever you see the poor doing something reprehensible, do not despise or discredit them for the fire of poverty is perhaps purifying their sinful actions, whoever slight they be. I find that a really fascinating sort of thing. He knows it’s easy to just judge the lifestyle choices of somebody who’s poor to assume they must have deserved it in some way. And Gregory’s argument, and Leo echoes it here, is that perhaps this is their purgatory here on earth as the fire of poverty is purifying them.
We don’t know that, but don’t stand in judgment over them as a result. Alright, the next Western father St a of Milan, as I say, he doesn’t really get his own section, but he’s mentioned this particular ley that he gave is mentioned on Naboth, who’s the guy who Ahab and Jezebel steal his land. He’s a poor man whose property is unjustly seized and he’s presented in the context. Ambrose is presented in the context of being the great mentor of St. Augustine, which he is, but it’s worth hearing ambrose’s thoughts because he sounds very similar to Gregory and to St. John, Chris system and so many of the other church fathers.
And he’s talking here about actually this line. Well, it is based on Namath but also based on the line in Proverbs about basically casting out the others. And so you build up a house bigger and bigger and so you end up being alone. The kind of isolating effect that wealth and power can have says, why do you cast out the companion whom nature has given you in claim for yourself? Nature’s possession. The earth was established in common for all rich and poor. Why do you alone owe rich demand special treatment nature, which begets everyone poor, knows no wealth for we’re not born with clothing or begotten with gold and silver. In other words, wealth inequality is social. It’s not natural. And so you can’t pretend that you have a monopoly on nature. You can’t pretend that the things of the world simply belong to you just because you’re powerful enough in the social order to claim them.
So he says, jumping forward quite a bit in the homily here, whatever you have contributed to the poor therefore is profitable to you. Whatever you have diminished by is gained to you. In other words, however much you give away of your wealth, that’s what you’ve kept. You feed yourself of the food that you’ve given to the poor for the one who’s merciful to the poor is fed himself and there’s fruit already in these things. Mercy is sown on the earth and germinates in heaven, it’s planted in the poor and sprouted forth in God’s presence. Beautiful line. He then quotes again from Proverbs. This is Proverbs 3 28 says, do not say to your neighbor, go and come again tomorrow. I will give it when you have it with you. In other words, if you have the means to serve the poor, do it. Don’t just put it off.
And Amber says, if God’s not even content to say tomorrow, I will give. How in the world do you imagine he’s going to be okay with you saying, I’m not going to give all, it is not anything of yours that you’re bestowing on the poor. Rather you were giving back something of his that is something of the poors. This is what someone’s called the universal destination of goods. The Second Vatican Council talks about this and it gets lambasted as some kind of calm propaganda and it’s simply not. It’s a recognition that prior to things like private property, there is this sense in which all of the things of the earth are given for the enjoyment of all of us here on earth. And so if a handful of people try to claim everything for themselves, they’re ripping off everybody else. Even if they’re powerful enough to do it, even if they’re powerful enough to create laws that tell them that they have it, they’ve still defrauded everyone else.
And so when you give to the poor, Ambrose says, don’t even think of it as charity. Think of it as simply justice. You’re giving back something that belongs to your poor neighbor. He, as we just heard, it was a major influence on St. Augustine. He brings about Augustine’s conversion and Pope Leo comments on Augustine is formed in this same tradition and he taught this preferential love for the poor, that God has a special love for the poor and down trodden and that Augustine realized that true ecclesial communion is expressed also in the communion of goods, right? The church is not fully one if some people in the church are massively wealthy and don’t take care of people in the church that are not as wealthy. That’s true at the local level and through at the global level. Few years back, I was talking with, I think it’s probably fair to say his name, Archbishop Nauman, the now retired archbishop of the Archdiocese of Kansas City, Kansas.
And he shared that one of the concerns he had for the future of the archdiocese is that parishes are geographic, which is good normally, but that the city was becoming very socioeconomically stratified and divided. So if you go into a major city, oftentimes the very rich neighborhood and the very poor neighborhood are next to each other. But in the suburbs when there’s a lot of suburban areas in Kansas City, Kansas, in the suburbs, you can have these just miles of wealthy suburbs and then separated miles of poor, neglected communities and parishes then start to reflect those stratified realities. So you have a parish that just the wealthy people go to, you have a parish that just the poor people go to that that’s not good, that something about the communion of the church isn’t reflected in that. And so this was something that weighed on his heart.
It was something he was trying to figure out how to resolve. It’s not an easy problem to solve because you can’t just say everybody go across town, we’re going to start busing for churches or something like that. But there needs to be this way in which the poor are brought into the view of the rich. And when we don’t have that, we don’t have the fullness of the communion we’re meant to have. It’s not just that we’re separated on doctrine or something, it’s that we’re separated on the communion of goods. Go back and read acts and you see that the church took care of its own. There are different ways of doing that, but if we’re not doing that at all, that’s not a good sign. So going back to Leo’s commentary on Augustine, his commentaries on the Psalms, Augustine reminds us that true Christians do not neglect love for those most in need, observing your brothers and sisters if they’re in need, but if Christ dwells in, you also be charitable to strangers.
This sharing of goods. Leo says therefore stems from theological charity and has as his ultimate goal the love of Christ for Augustine the poor, not just people to be helped but the sacramental presence of the Lord. I love that this is something that the Pope is explicitly putting forward, that in the poor we find the presence of Christ. And of course you heard this from St. John Chris system. You don’t want to separate Christ’s sacramental presence from the sacramental presence in a little bit of a looser sense in the way that Christ is present among the least of these. So that then turns us to something you’re not going to get in an ngo, you’re not going to get in the global let’s just solve global poverty kind of angle, which is the truth. Theology of charity. We’ve been hearing it from the church fathers, but Leo is going to present his own thoughts on it.
Now here, apologies in advance because this is basically just lines from the apostolic expectation I really liked found powerful and I tried to put them more or less in order. They’re a little bit out of order. He goes throughout the Old Testament shows the Lord here is the cry of the poor and that we need to do likewise. And he says the Old Testament history of God’s preferential love for the poor and his readiness to hear their cry, to which I have briefly alluded, comes as fulfillment in Jesus of Nazarus. Okay? The fact that he’s of Nazareth may not strike you as relevant, but I heard a beautiful homily that’s worth sharing here. Nazareth was a very blue collar town and didn’t have a great reputation. And I’m sorry I said homily. I actually heard it was a theology on tap talk in the diocese of Arlington many years ago, many, many years ago.
And I want to say it’s by Father Keith O’Hare, but I wouldn’t promise it. Someone in the diocese of Arlington, Virginia gave this incredible theology tap talk, talking about Jesus of Nazareth being from Nazareth and how one of the first reactions we hear is in John one, can anything good come from Nazareth because it’s that kind of town. And so the priest said to make sense of this, think of your own town and that part of the town or maybe the next door, city, whatever it is that just has that kind of reputation. The place where it’s a little rundown, it’s a little trashy, it’s a little not where you’d want to be from Christ willingly is from there, grows up there and has emblazoned upon the cross Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews, that this is what’s written on the throne of Christ.
He is Jesus of the poor. And so again, fill in Jesus of Appalachia, Jesus of whatever it’s like your local rundown area, blue collar area, the place you look down on, the place that you judge. This is the place Christ comes and unites to himself and redeems in a special way. So polio says by the incarnation, Jesus emptied himself taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And in that form he brought us salvation. His was a radical poverty grounded in his mission to reveal fully God’s love for us. Now look, when we’re talking about the poverty of Christ, it begins with the poverty of emptying himself. As we just heard, he has not just like he’s a millionaire who voluntarily becomes poor, he has infinite power and glory and might and he takes the form of a slave in an authentic way. He undergoes regular hardship, hardship he could in an instant be spared from, but voluntarily enters into.
Leo says that St. Paul puts it in his customarily brief but striking manner. As an aside, I rarely disagree with the Pope, but I’m not sure I would describe St. Paul as customarily brief. If you’ve ever read a Paul line sentence, say regularly go on for many verses. In any case he says, you know, well the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor so that by his poverty you might become rich. Now, this isn’t just an incidental detail. People aren’t just reading too much into the gospel. Christ voluntarily enters into a radical poverty and this is worth stressing because you have things like prosperity, gospel preachers who will outright deny this, who will say, oh no, if you’re called to be a Christian, you’re going to be comfortable. Just name it and claim it. This is the gospel of prosperity and wealth and that is so much opposed to the gospel of Christ who though he was rich yet for your sake became poor, that by his poverty you might become rich. Not by having a Cessna, not by having your own mansion, but by having salvation, by having union with Christ, by becoming one with him and sharing his divine nature. That’s the promise. So don’t let anybody sell you on a bill of goods that you can become the mighty who could cast down.
So that’s paragraph 18. I really like that part. I’m going to jump all the way to paragraph 52. He’s talking about, so he goes through this whole section of all the different ways we see different religious orders and groups throughout the ages living out this call to live in radical community with the poor and to do all this stuff and it is beautiful. But then he has this incredible line, the Christian tradition of visiting the sick, washing their wounds and comforting afflicted is not simply a philanthropic endeavor, but ecclesial action through which the members of the church touched the suffering flesh of Christ. I think we’ve already talked about that from a few angles, but that I don’t know. Something about that I found very beautiful, very powerful. I’m going to jump all the way now to paragraph one 10 because again, he says, for us Christians, the problem of the poor leads to the very heart of our faith. I recently saw someone saying this focus on the poor is not a super important part of Christianity. This is not a major part of the New Testament and that is wildly wrong. Read the New Testament read the church fathers read 2000 years of what Christians have been saying on this. No, the care for the poor is enormous and care for them materially, but also caring for them spiritually preaching the good news to the poor. This is all over the New Testament and frankly all over a lot of the Old Testament as well.
But Leo says, for Christians the poor not merely a sociological category, he actually just says not a sociological category, but the very flesh of Christ. It is not enough to profess the doctrine of God’s incarnation in general terms. To enter truly into this mystery, we need to understand clearly that the Lord took on a flesh that hungers and thirst and experiences infirmity and imprisonment. Yeah, we’ve got to take seriously that when he talks about the least of these, he actually means that this isn’t just plum, this isn’t just nice talk. This is very much the heart of our faith.
Okay? Again, like I said, jumping around paragraph 76, Christian holiness often flourishes in the most forgotten and wounded places of humanity, the poorest of the poor. Those who lack not only material goods, but also a voice and the recognition of their dignity have a special place in God’s heart. This is what throughout the document he calls the preferential love for the poor, the beloved of the gospel, the heirs to the kingdom. It is in them that Christ continues to suffer and rise again. It is in them that the church rediscovers her call to show her most authentic self.
And so building on this that there is a special love for the poor. There’s a warning here that I think is very important. He says, while it’s true the rich care for the poor, the opposite is no less true. This is a remarkable fact confirmed by the entire Christian tradition. Lives can actually be turned around by the realization that the poor have much to teach us about the gospel and its demands by their silent witness. They make us confront the precariousness of our existence. In other words, we often imagine we’re just going to go deliver the goods of the gospel by helping materially and spiritually the objects of our concern, these poor people. And that’s not a bad desire, but that is an incomplete depiction of the story because while the well to do can care for those who are not so well to do, the reverse is true as well that you might be the one converted by going to help your poor neighbor.
The elderly, he says for example, by their physical frailty, remind us of our own fragility even as we attempt to conceal it behind our apparent prosperity and outward appearance. One of the reasons that we probably want to keep the dying the elderly out of view, we put them in homes somewhere, we don’t talk about it very much. You can go years and decades without having experienced the reality of death, which is a wild thing if you think about it. I mean, imagine throughout history how long you would go without experiencing the reality of death and chances are not very long. But now you can go decades and not be able to name a funeral you’ve been to or a person who’s close to you who’s died where you actually saw them at any point you might go to the funeral, but you didn’t really see them the last few years of their life.
So it was just like there was somebody, then they disappeared and then a few years later you heard they died. That’s kind of the way a lot of our society is set up where we hide frailty, we hide weakness and decay and death and mortality. And it’s not good for us that we do that because we forget about our mortality, our fragility, our need for God and the reality of judgment. And so the elderly and I would add to this, those who are dying like the sick and so on, can remind us of our own weakness, fragility, our need for God, our mortality, and the fact that will somebody be judged Leo and support to remind us how baseless is the aggressive arrogance, the attitude of aggressive arrogance with which we frequently confront life’s difficulties. They remind us how uncertain and empty or seemingly safe and secure lives may be that the stuff you think matters a lot.
You have a reality check in the face of the poor and then this is a long quote from Pope St. Gregory the great, but it’s worth mentioning him again. He says, let no one consider himself secure saying I do not steal from others, but simply enjoy what is rightfully mine. Right? I’ve talked about this objection a few times. The rich man, this is again, he’s talking about the rich man in Lazarus. The rich man was not punished. He took what belonged to others because while possessing such great riches, he had become impoverished within. This was indeed the reason for his condemnation to hell and his prosperity. He preserved no sense of justice. The wealth he had received made him proud and caused him to lose all sense of compassion. So you can see the church fathers have different ways of describing this same reality, but they’re pointing towards the same thing.
If you’ve got a bunch of stuff and you are indifferent to the needs of others and you’re not using that stuff for them, there’s a real sense in which you are depriving them in a real sense in which you’re going to be judged for that. So let’s talk about some practical challenges to kind of round this out. We’ve seen 2000 years church has cared a lot about this idea of caring for the poor. We’ve seen, hopefully this is rooted in theology. This isn’t just a social justice project, but it’s based on what we believe about the origins of all of our goods, what we believe about Christ entering into poverty, what we believe about seeing Christ in the poor, what we believe about the spiritual benefits, both we can offer to them and they can offer to us. What about all the nitty gritty? Now I’m going to get into a tiny bit of this part.
Look, this is where you often are going to lose people. They’re going to say, oh, well this program doesn’t work or That idea doesn’t work. And I understand that and I think Leo understands that and he’s got some good words to say on that score. We’ll get to that in a moment. So let’s talk just briefly then about, again, I’m calling these the practical challenges, and I mean this as something of a play on words, both how do we put this all into practice, but also the challenging part of being challenged to do it, to actually be told it’s not enough to just think about how good this is. Go do it now. So again, jumping around a little bit, let’s start with paragraph one 12. He points out that there have been times where there have been Christian movements in groups that have arisen, which don’t seem particularly interested in the common good or with the vulnerable and disadvantaged members, and he warns, we must never forget that religion, especially Christian religion, cannot be limited to the private sphere as if believers had no business making their voice heard with regard to problems affecting civil society and issues of concern to its members.
So in other words, if you’ve got a religious movement and you call yourself Christian, but it’s just about individual self-improvement and not the transformation of society that’s not fully Christian because the Christian isn’t worried simply about himself, he’s worried about the society as well. And so you actually need to step out and worry about civil society and your neighbor. You can’t just close yourself off from the neighbor or surround yourself with just a self-selected group of neighbors that are easy to love and imagine that you’re doing the Christian thing. I think it’s a good warning. I think it’s challenging. It doesn’t play to everybody, but it’s worth calling out 4 0 7. He says, the many forms of indifference we see all around us are in fact signs of an approach to life that is spreading in various and subtle ways. Now, this part sounds like Pope Francis and then I looked at the footnote and it was in fact a quotation from Pope Francis.
What is more caught up as we are with our own needs? The side of a person who is suffering disturbs us. It makes us uneasy since we have no time to waste on other people’s problems. These he says, are symptoms of an unhealthy society, a society that seeks prosperity but turns us back on suffering. May we not sink to such depths. Let us look to the example of the good Samaritan, the final words of the gospel parable. Go and do likewise represent a mandate that every Christian must daily take to heart that this is when Jesus has asked what it means to love, our neighbor really is asked, who is my neighbor? And then he gives the good Samaritan to show what it means to live out of love for your neighbor, that if you are not doing that, something is missing. And so daily we should be reflecting on this call to go and do likewise.
Jump ahead a little bit to paragraph one 14. Leo says, it’s not simply a question of providing welfare assistance and working to ensure social justice. We should be aware that another way that we don’t treat the poor well is a lack of spiritual care that our preferential option for the poor must mainly translate into a privileged and preferential religious care. That word mainly there is really interesting that we can often have this idea that, okay, the well to do need the gospel and the poor need free stuff. They need houses, they need food, they need all this other stuff. And don’t get me wrong, houses, food, all that stuff are really important. But if we give them those things and not the gospel, we have deprived them in a huge way. Now at the same time, it can’t be one of the expense of the other. So I think that’s a good kind of challenge and a good call.
Another practical concern is that in doing that, again, we just treat them as objects. And so he warns of the need to consider marginalized communities as subjects capable of creating their own culture rather than as objects of charity on the part of others. And this call is echoed a few times throughout the document that this can’t just be your project in a way that doesn’t treat the other person as fully human. You can kind of someone that’s called white knighting, you can kind of be a white knight where you just come in, I’m going to go save the poor people. And you might yourself need to be saved by this encounter with the poor. And you might yourself find out they have different ideas about what they need than my idea. For them, it turns out because are living, breathing human beings made in the image of God and they have an intellect and they have a will.
They might have ideas about what the gospel means. They might have ideas about what their needs are, et cetera. So don’t just that colonizer attitude. My words, not the pulps, but nevertheless. Alright, let’s go back a couple paragraphs to paragraph 98. This was a line I really enjoyed because he quotes, he says, a document that was not initially well received by everyone. And you know what that document was? It was Cardinal Ratzinger as the head of the CDF before he became Pope Benedict with a document called An Instruction on a Theology of Liberation. And it was a critique of some of the Marxist influences that had crept into liberation theology. And I think this is really incredible because a few things. One, it’s easy to see all this stuff about the preferential option for the poor and imagine, oh no, the church has gone completely woke or it’s gone completely Marxist, it’s just gone completely liberation theology.
And here are all these guys who are associated with Marxism who called themselves liberation theologians and so on. And instead the magistrate of the church is saying, don’t forget this thing. We said that was very controversial and it’s the critique of where liberation theology has gone wrong. So if there are elements of liberation theology worth proclaiming, absolutely yes, but don’t just blindly accept everything. So I’m glad that this was appealed to because this is a document that was incredibly influential in my own life when I was in college, I read this and it was mind blowing to me. And then a few months after I read it, Pope John Paul II died and then Pope Benedict became the Pope. It’s a bigger story for another day. But in that document, one of the things that Benedict reminds us of than Harasser reminds us of is that the defenders of orthodoxy sometimes are accused of passivity, indulgence, or culpable complicity regarding the intolerable situations of injustice and the political regimes which prolong them.
So think particularly about the Latin American context where this arises, but you can make this point more broadly in the Latin American context. There was this critique on the one side that people cared about. The poor were a bunch of Marxists. On the other side, the people who cared about orthodoxy, who were just complicit in radical social inequality and were comfortable and powerful and weren’t doing a lot for the poor, and Rader says both of those are problems, don’t become a crazy Marxist, but also if you’re Orthodox, it’s not enough to just be indifferent. He says Spiritual conversion, the intensity of the love of God and neighbor, zeal for justice and peace. The gospel meaning of the poor and of poverty are required of everyone and especially of pastors and those in positions of responsibility. The concern for the purity of the faith demands giving the answer of effective witness in the service of one’s neighbor, the poor and the oppressed in particular in an integral theological fashion.
In other words, don’t think you have to choose between orthodoxy and care for the poor. The more orthodox you are, the more you care about the purity of the faith, the more you should put that faith in practice caring for the oppressed, the downtrodden, the least of these. And if you do that, by the way, you’re not going to get a bunch of Marxists. He doesn’t say that part. I’m saying that part. Let’s turn to the final kind of encouragement that I thought was actually really helpful. He just talks about how it’s good to give alms, you and I, we’re not going to fix society, we’re not going to fix global poverty, but we can and should and must give to the poor in whatever way we can. He says, I’d like to close by saying something about alms giving, which nowadays is not looked upon favorably, even among believers.
Not only is it rarely practiced, but it is even at times disparaged and I think we’ve all heard that like, oh, don’t give it to the poor, they’re just going to use it on drugs and alcohol. They’re just going to make their lives. You’re just enabling them. It’d be better not to give to the poor. Now look, he’s not going to say go buy drugs for somebody who’s addicted. He’s not going to say anything like that, but he is going to say, don’t just attack alms giving. He says, let me state once again that the most important way to help the disadvantaged is to assist them in finding a good job. They can lead a more dignified life by developing their abilities and contributing their fair share. So first of all, creating a society of dependence isn’t the goal of alms giving. So he is sensitive to one of the ways you can give alms isn’t just by giving the change in your pocket or giving a government contract of just like we’re going to give a bunch of money to the poor, giving food, all that stuff.
Those things can all be good in the right context, but the most important way to help people who are downtrodden if you’re able to is help them get a good job. Remember, this is part of treating the poorest subjects and not just objects that this person is actually capable of providing for themselves with a little bit of help. And so if you can provide that help and get them connected, whatever that looks like in your own life and context, that’s a lot of what’s being said here and I think that’s really helpful. That’s really good. My dad owns a small business and a few years back he realized that one of the ways he could help is by periodically hiring the homeless. And that’s a challenge for a lot of reasons. It’s a pool business. There’s people working in backyards, so you’ve got customers who wouldn’t be totally comfortable with that.
You got to make sure you, there’s a lot of stuff you got to watch out for, but he took a risk and I think it paid off. I think that he formed some valuable relationships and helped some people who were going through some really tough times, and I think it was an eyeopening experience on both sides. I don’t want to tell his whole story, I didn’t get his permission to share any of this, but it’s something that I found really striking and realized, oh yeah, a lot of us could be doing more to do things like this. That’s not everybody’s capable of doing that. That’s not what everybody is maybe called to do. But if you’re in a spot where you can do things like that, that can be a really ennobling experience of caring for the poor rather than an experience where you just treat them again as objects of mercy.
Leo says, those inspired by true charity know full well that alms giving does not absolve the competent authorities of their responsibilities. Eliminate the duty of government institutions to care for the poor or detract from rightful efforts to ensure justice. So in other words, just as alms giving doesn’t mean you’re just giving a handout and not helping people with a long-term improvement. If you can teach a man to fish, that’s better than giving him a fish for a day. Well, also, it’s not a matter of do we want the government to care for the poor or do we want individual charity to care for the poor? It’s not an either or. And so just as we’re not free to just pass the buck onto the government, neither should our care for the poor eliminate the legitimate need for society to care for the least of these.
There are obviously lots of political debates about what that ought to look like, but there is a need for a just society to have measures in place to care for those who cannot care for themselves and to care for those who are in need of help. And your individual oms giving does not get rid of the government’s need to do that, so it’s not either or. I hope that’s clear. He says Alms giving at least offers us a chance to halt before the poor to look into their eyes, to touch them and to share something of ourselves with them. In any event, alms giving, however modest, brings a touch of PTOs like pity in the holy sense and endo a society otherwise marked by the frenetic pursuit of personal gain. In the words the book of Proverbs, those who are generous, are blessed for they share their bread with the poor.
So notice in that it’s not just like you pass by and drop some coins in the cup, which again, not knocking it, there’s an opportunity to have a real experience of communion, a breaking of the bread with the poor, and to see in them the humanity of someone else made in the image of God. I’m going to jump forward to one 19. I think this is the last paragraph I’m covering. I think there may be one more I’ve forgotten, but I think this is the last one because it’s a great, again expectation, which is the whole nature of this document. He says, our love and our deepest convictions need to be continually cultivated and we do so through our concrete actions remaining in the realm of ideas and theories, while failing to give them expression through frequent and practical acts of charity, we’ll eventually cause even our most cherished hopes and aspirations to weak and fade away.
In other words, you might’ve been listening this whole time and thinking, yay, I know all that. But if we’re not living it out through frequent and practical acts of charity, then it doesn’t mean much. It’s faith without works and instead, and this is something that we have to actually put into practice. So we need to have these convictions continually cultivated through concrete actions. The idea of caring for the poor is nice. The actual habitual practice of caring for the poor is what we’re actually striving for this reason, the Pope says we Christians must not abandon alms giving. It can be done in different ways and surely more effectively, but it must continue to be done. It is always better, at least to do something rather than nothing. Whatever form it may take, alms giving will touch and soften our hardened hearts. So he’s completely fine with the critique.
Yeah, some of our ideas for how to help the poor aren’t very efficient. Some aren’t very effective. There are better ways of doing things, and he’s like, yeah, sure, great, but don’t let that get in the way of doing something. GK Chesterton said, anything worth doing is worth doing badly, but the fact that you don’t have the perfect solution to global poverty doesn’t mean your complacency is the right answer. It means do what you can, even though it’s not perfect. He says it will not solve the problem of world poverty, yet it must still be carried out with intelligence, diligence and social responsibility. For our part, we need to give alms as a way of reaching out and touching the suffering flesh of the poor. That is, I think, a great bit of encouragement. A great reminder that those of us who maybe in Matthew six, Jesus gives three things.
He says, when you not if you do, he says, when you pray, when you fast, when you give alms, and many of us I think are maybe better at praying or maybe praying and fasting, then we are the giving of evolves, and there’s probably a lot of reasons for that. Maybe the society in which we live in, we don’t come into contact with the poor as much as we could or should. Maybe we’re worried that we don’t know how to do it right. We don’t want to make the problem worse, and so we just don’t do anything, which isn’t the right answer, whatever it is. Maybe it’s just our own complacency or the fact that we think of ourselves as like, well, I worry about the spiritual stuff. I don’t worry about the alms giving stuff. Whatever our excuse may be. The pulp says, no, no, still do it, but do it in an intelligent, diligent, and socially responsible way.
That doesn’t mean you have to give to every single person who asks you. It doesn’t mean you have to give in a reckless way. If I’ve known of situations where someone is maybe relapsing into drug addiction and then they send you a Venmo request, they want some money, they claim it’s for something, and you think, I think I know what this is for. He’s not saying do it then. So do it in an intelligent and diligent and a socially responsible way, but don’t take those legitimate concerns as an excuse to do nothing. It’s okay if all of your efforts are imperfect. It’s okay if you’re not able to single-handedly resolve the problem of global poverty, or if your efforts don’t eliminate the need for the government to do something or for aid workers to do something, or NGOs to do something or the church to do something, that’s all fine. You do your part again, as an expectation. I find it convicting. I can look and say, I’ve fallen short of these words many times and I don’t want to see what the church fathers would think of some of my half-hearted or incomplete or non-existent efforts. And so I think we can learn from Pope Leo. I think we can learn from all the church fathers that there’s more that we could be doing and we should go out and do it for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer, God bless you.