By Jess Agustin
When a new pope speaks, the Church listens for direction.
On Oct 4, the feast of St Francis of Assisi, Pope Leo XIV signed his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te (“I have loved you”). In doing so, the Pope centered it on love for the poor, continuing Pope Francis’ pastoral vision and making it the central theme of his own pontificate.
An apostolic exhortation is not a doctrinal decree but a way for the pope to speak heart to heart with the Church and the world. It sets the tone of a papacy.
Francis started with Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”). Leo begins with Dilexi Te, on love for the poor. Both remind the faithful where the Church’s focus is: not in power or privilege but in the margins where Christ is still present.
Dilexi Te builds on a draft begun by Pope Francis, and Leo has placed his distinct imprint on it.
Shaped by nearly twenty years as a missionary in Peru, he writes as one who has eaten with indigenous families, walked with farmers, and prayed beside the poor. For him, love for the poor is not charity from above but kinship that closes the distance.
By placing the poor at the heart of his first exhortation, Leo signals that the Church is to be measured not by its ceremonies or balance sheets but by its fidelity and closeness to those on the margins.
Rooted in the long tradition of Catholic social teaching, from Rerum Novarum to Fratelli Tutti, Dilexi Te speaks with fresh urgency amid scandalous inequality and ecological collapse.
Its tone is tender and prophetic. Leo urges believers to move beyond convenience into genuine solidarity, making the Gospel visible through lives marked by justice, compassion, and humility.
That call lands hard in Asia, where luxury and poverty often share the same street.
In countries like India and Indonesia, the top one percent control close to half of the national wealth, while millions struggle to afford food, housing, and basic services.
Church in an unequal world
Asia now has more billionaires than any other region, even as millions survive on a few dollars a day.
In Hong Kong, Singapore, and the nations of the Persian Gulf, migrant workers send money home while living far from their children, packed in dormitories with little freedom.
In Bangladesh, women garment workers keep the global fashion industry humming, but earn less than what it takes to live.
In the Philippines and India, Indigenous communities are displaced for mines, while poor families in cities are evicted for luxury condos.
Corruption deepens the wound.
In the Philippines, staggering amounts of public funds are siphoned off into fake or shoddy flood-control projects while people drown during the rainy season.
In Nepal, Indonesia, and the Philippines, protests have erupted, signs of a people no longer willing to bear injustice in silence.
In Myanmar and Cambodia, forests are cleared and villages uprooted by deals struck behind closed doors, as the cry of the poor grows harder to ignore.
Leo sees more than the failure of governance. He sees a deeper sickness: a hardening of the heart that forgets the poor.
For the Asian Church, this reality is stark.
Catholic communities stand at that intersection of privilege and exclusion: parishes filled with overseas workers on their rare days off, dioceses that run hospitals and schools serving the poor while engaging with elites, and bishops striving to balance prophetic advocacy with pastoral prudence.
In such settings, Dilexi Te becomes a mirror, asking whether the Church will allow itself to be reflected truthfully in its pages.
The Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC) has long spoken of the “Dialogue with the Poor” as central to its mission. That vision resonates with Dilexi Te, though the gap between word and practice remains a challenge.
Too often, the poor are seen as recipients of seasonal aid rather than partners in mission. Leo’s words sharpen the challenge: solidarity with the poor must be lived in concrete, not ceremonial, transformative, not symbolic ways.
Call for conversion
This call requires courage within the Church itself. Bishops often walk a fine line with power, and the temptation to stay neutral, or worse, to align with the empire, is strong.
Dilexi Te warns that comfort and distance from suffering can weaken the Church’s witness. Leo reminds the Church that true discipleship involves humility and risk.
“Solidarity also means fighting against the structural causes of poverty and inequality,” the exhortation adds. “It means confronting the destructive effects of the empire of money.”
That vision widens charity into justice. It praises the work of grassroots communities and movements that challenge the systems and structures keeping people poor, affirming that the Church’s option for the poor must lead to transformation, not just short-term assistance.
The exhortation recognizes that poverty today takes many forms: material, social, and ecological and that indifference to any of them wounds faith.
The Church’s credibility is most evident when it walks with and listens to the poor.
Leo’s message reaches beyond the Church. When the cries of those left out go unheard, societies grow sick. Inequality breeds not only economic pain but moral decay.
“If politicians do not listen to the poor,” he cautions, “democracy atrophies.”
When compassion disappears from public life, truth and freedom erode.
Dilexi Te is a summons to conversion of hearts, institutions, and systems that tolerate exclusion. The poor, Leo reminds, are not passive recipients of charity but teachers of faith, bearers of wisdom, and instruments of renewal. To ignore them is to close one’s ears to the Gospel.
“When the Church bends down to care for the poor, she assumes her highest posture,” it tells emphatically. – UCA News
*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.
