I would like to share two reflections on Dilexi Te.
- The first is by Cardinal Michael Felix Czerny, SJ, Prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
- The second is by Fr James Hanvey, SJ, the Secretary for the Service of Faith of the Society of Jesus.
Dilexi Te and the Society of Jesus | Cardinal Michael Czerny, SJ
Cardinal Michael Czerny, SJ shares how this deep, personal love inspires the entire Society of Jesus to commit to one of their Universal Apostolic Preferences: “To walk with the excluded”. Hear how this spiritual conviction propels the Jesuit mission toward social justice and reconciliation in the world today.
Transcript
Dilexi Te is the first major document published by Pope Leo. He himself says that Pope Francis had already been working on it. And so it’s a joint — you might say — teaching: the two of them together, teaching in great harmony, in great coherence, one with the other.
And, well, the significance is that you might say the first document is often considered to mark an important trend or an important theme. I would say, just as Evangelii Gaudium did with Pope Francis — even though, in fact, that was already the second document — I think that Dilexi Te will prove to be an important marker of Pope Leo’s magisterium.
For us Jesuits, to walk with the excluded today there are really two important steps. One is to perceive them — to see them, to recognize them. The excluded are practically by definition just beyond our horizon. And so we need to make some move. We need to open some door, open some window, so as to come into contact with them and be able to listen to them.
What’s interesting about this is that it’s true of everyone, everywhere. There’s no particular place on earth where this would not be relevant. And the second thing — and this comes also from the great effort of synodality — is to listen to them. Those of us who are privileged with education and resources are very tempted to go to the peripheries with solutions, and to neglect asking sincerely and deeply what people actually want and need.
There are so many examples of discovering the wants and the needs of those who are forced to flee. In fact, in some ways, for me, the experience with them over the years in the Migrants and Refugees Section was that I actually discovered — or rediscovered, or discovered more deeply — that I myself came from a migrant and refugee family, and that we had been forced to flee a couple of years after World War II.
We also landed in a strange country, we were sponsored by a generous family, and we faced many of the same challenges that migrants and refugees spoke about when they shared their experiences with us.
What I’ve been learning over the recent years is that the signs of hope depend a bit on your perspective or your point of view. And, at the risk of overgeneralizing, I would say that the higher your viewpoint — the more you are, you might say, at the so-called global level — the more depressing it gets.
At the high level or at the large scale, the problems seem totally insurmountable and really totally discouraging. The experience is one of helplessness and powerlessness.
Whereas, when you approach the same questions from the ground up — that is to say, in real situations and in real contexts, on a much smaller human scale — you suddenly discover that God’s people are very creative in responding to challenges, that God is very generous with his grace, and that the Church is very present and, in fact, very involved in many of the challenges that people do face.
And so, even some of the most intractable problems — maybe the most vast one we have right now is climate change — you don’t get the same feeling of depression when you’re with people as you do when you look at it from a global point of view.
So I can say that walking with the poor — which obviously means having your feet on earth and walking modestly at the local level — that walking with the poor is also a source of real hope.
Because with regard to every one of the problems that you want to list as global challenges, you can find all sorts of examples of people facing those challenges locally. And those are often initiatives of the local Church, of other religious congregations, also of the Society of Jesus. And that’s where the real hope, I would say, comes from.
We need to believe that by facing these issues locally and, in a sense, modestly, that bit by bit we will also be contributing to the bigger solutions.
The Spirituality of Dilexi Te | James Hanvey, SJ
Fr James Hanvey, SJ, the Secretary for the Service of Faith, shares deep insights on Pope Leo XIV’s first Apostolic Exhortation, Dilexi Te. This is more than a discussion of a papal document; it’s an exploration of the radical Christian spirituality at its heart.
Fr Hanvey stresses that the love for the poor is not a side project or a commendable policy – it is the key dimension of our entire mission. This love is what truly enables us to imitate Jesus, poor and humble, making our actions a direct reflection of Christ’s own life and values.
The Society of Jesus has made this focus central through the second Universal Apostolic Preference: Walking with the Excluded. This video explains why this Preference is an absolutely integral part of the Jesuit mission and charism, and a vital call to the whole Church.
Fr Hanvey dives into the profound shift in perspective that underpins true Christian service: the movement from seeing a person as a mere object of our charity to recognizing them as a full subject in their own right.
This shift acknowledges that every person has a dignity that needs to be respected and a soul that needs to be nourished, just as much as their body. It is about fostering an agency that needs to be given the means to create and thrive. While this work often takes practical forms – social, political, and economic – Fr Hanvey explains that it is fundamentally the law of grace.
As he puts it, “Whenever Christ encounters us he never treats us like an object but always as a subject, a person, to whom he wishes to give the Kingdom.” This spiritual principle transforms how we approach justice, service, and evangelization.
Transcript
Dilexi Te is an interesting document in many ways.
Of course, as you know, it’s begun by Pope Francis and completed and developed by Pope Leo. It’s interesting not just because of its genesis like that. It’s interesting also because it is really a sort of good compendium of all the teachings of the popes since Vatican II right up until Pope Leo, of the Church’s commitment to the poor. Indeed, one of the titles of one of the chapters is A Church for and of the Poor. The Church of the poor and a Church for the poor is a way of thinking about the Church that certainly is there right from the very beginning of the Church’s own life, but receives particular emphasis with John XXIII, and then again with Paul VI, and then again with St John Paul II.
And of course, obviously as we all know, it was one of the central themes of Pope Francis’s whole ministry as Pope — and how wonderfully well he demonstrated that, not just in his words but also in his actions.
You can read this document in many different ways. You could read it as a sort of compendium and get very beautiful quotations from it. But I want to suggest that there’s another way of reading it — that actually it’s a deeply contemplative document.
And I think the key to it is really the second chapter in which the Pope reflects on God’s love of the poor, and we see how the poor stand in God’s eyes. They are the first in God’s eyes. I was reminded of a beautiful phrase that comes from Benedict XVI in his very first encyclical, which was also a theme about the poor, and there Benedict talks about “the heart that has eyes.”
So I think one of the intentions of Dilexi Te is actually our own conversion — it’s the opening of our own eyes and our own hearts to the realities of poverty in all its different dimensions in our world today. And why that’s important, and why it’s important that we start from God and we start from Christ, is because that’s another way — a true way — of seeing the reality of poverty.
There are so many different ways in which we’re taught to see or not see the poor. There are many ideologies which shape how we think about them, what we believe about them, how we moralize about them. There are many different systems that create poverty in one way or another. And so we’re already shaped in how we see — the eyes that we’re given, our culture gives us, our society gives us, our governments give us, the whole political scene, the economy gives us. All of these things.
I think that Dilexi Te is inviting us to stand back from that and to open our eyes again and, from the perspective of Christ — from the perspective of God — to look again at our world and to see with new eyes.
And when we do that, what we see is beautiful people who are caught up in systems over which they have no control. And they’re not at fault for this. One of the key messages of Dilexi Te is to see them as real subjects, not as objects.
Because part of what we want to do is empower people. To make somebody an object can also be virtuous — I recognize the need that you have, I recognize that I can do something for you — but you remain there. I only see you in terms of your need. But poverty goes much deeper than that. Poverty actually makes us objects — whether it’s the objects of a system, whether it’s the objects of an economy, whether it’s the objects of an organization. It actually refuses our humanity. It refuses our dignity. It refuses to see us with Christ.
However, when I actually see beyond that and I see the human subject, I see a person who is completely alive — a person who has gifts, a person that has dreams and aspirations, whatever their circumstances, whatever their history, whatever they’ve had to deal with. And it’s then, as a subject — as a genuine subject, a subject first of God’s love, a subject first and foremost too of our culture — who has rights and who has dignity, that I hear the deep claim that they make upon me.
They are no longer a faceless other with a need. They become a person. And it’s when we recognize and see a person that we also recognize that they have a spiritual dimension which we have to attend to. They also need education. They also need to be given agency so that they can have the goods and all that’s necessary to build their life and to build their life and contribute to the community.
Because part and parcel of our dignity is not just working for ourselves — it’s working with and for others. That’s loving our neighbour in the deepest and most creative way possible.
So when we begin to read this document, start from that perspective. Start from that chapter in which the Apostolic Exhortation invites us to look at how Christ deals with the poor, but also how Christ himself is poor. And in doing that, we begin to realize our own poverty — and that we need one another. That we’re not enemies. That because somebody has something that I don’t have, it doesn’t make me an enemy. Or because I don’t have something, I’m not their enemy. It’s how can we work together? When we begin to do that…
Another beautiful chapter is the way in which the Apostolic Exhortation goes through the history of the Church’s commitment to the poor, and the way in which that’s realized in all the religious orders that have been founded to meet the needs of poverty — whether it’s the real physical and material poverty, whether it’s the spiritual poverty that does afflict people, or whether it’s also education — and particularly also the education of women.
Because the Apostolic Exhortation recognizes that women are really the subjects of the ways in which our systems make them poor — by depriving them of their rights and of their dignity, depriving them of education, depriving them of their agency and their way in which to earn a living for their families, to build a home, to build a future.
So when we do that, then we begin to see how the Church’s commitment has been there from the very beginning — and it couldn’t be otherwise, because if this truly is the Church of Christ, then it must be a Church for the poor and a Church of the poor.
And of course, Dilexi Te speaks directly to the Society of Jesus — not only because it has very publicly, over many years, made its option for the poor one of its primary concerns and primary works in all its apostolate, but because recently the Society has taken up what they call the four Universal Apostolic Preferences.
They’re all guided by the first Apostolic Preference, which is the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius — which again open us to the genuineness, the depth of the humanity of Christ, but also Christ’s work and Christ’s own poverty, especially on the cross, and the way in which Christ sends us into this world as consolers, as part of the mission of the risen Christ.
So from that primary Apostolic Preference come the other three, and one of them is to walk with the poor. Walking with the poor is not putting ourselves above the poor. Walking with the poor is more than just philanthropy. Walking with the poor is to share their burden with them. It’s to live with them. It’s to be in solidarity with them. It’s to know what it is — not just to be materially poor, but what it is to be deprived of your own agency, of your own ability to fashion your own life, to care for your family, to care for your community.
So deeply embedded in that is the Society of Jesus. One of the key parables that the document works with is Matthew 25 — that passage of the Last Judgment. And you’ll remember where people say to Christ: “I would have visited you in prison, but I didn’t see you. I would have fed you, but I didn’t see you. I would have clothed you, but I didn’t see you.”
And of course, the whole point of that extraordinary, radical parable is to say: you did see me — you didn’t recognize me. I was there. I was there in the naked. I was there with those in prison. I was there with the marginalized.
So we as Christians have that vocation to see Christ in the places where nobody wants to see him, because it is there that we find him — and in finding him, we also find ourselves. And once we do that, we are all rich.