Social Repentance
Newsletter for October 10, 2025
Pope Leo XIV issued the first apostolic exhortation of his pontificate yesterday. Titled Dilexi te (“I have loved you”), the document is concerned with the needs of the world’s poor.
Dilexi te comes less than a month after a highly publicized interview between Pope Leo and Crux reporter Elise Ann Allen in which the pontiff criticized the widening gap between executive and worker pay. “CEOs that 60 years ago might have been making four to six times more than what the workers are receiving, the last figure I saw, it’s 600 times more than what average workers are receiving,” he said at the time.
Introducing the document at a press conference at the Holy See on Thursday, Cardinal Michael Czerny, S.J., characterized poverty as both “a huge social problem” and a “theological theme.”
“Through the poor, God speaks to the church, faith becomes real in mercy and service that break down barriers, and God’s people experience the beatitude of the poor in spirit,” he said.
Czerny currently serves as the Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. The work of the dicastery “intertwines education, eucharist, and service,” he said. He described education as “the first act of justice, because it frees people from spiritual poverty and prepares them for social participation and responsibility.”
“Justice arises from including the excluded,” he said.
The cardinal noted that “poverty results from structures of sin,” including selfishness and indifference. “The economy that kills measures human value in terms of productivity, consumption, and profit,” he said.
“The church’s response denounces the false impartiality of the market,” he continued. Such a response “fosters a form of communal or social repentance that restores dignity to the invisible.”
Czerny elaborated on the role of the church that “offers mercy to the world, promoting a civilization in which every person is recognized as the image of God.” Treating the poor with dignity “is the first act of peace,” he said.
The drafting of Dilexi te was initiated by Pope Francis earlier this year. The document was conceived as a follow-up of sorts to his 2024 encyclical letter Dilexit nos (“He loved us”), on the theme of the Sacred Heart of Christ. Leo quotes from Francis numerous times in the document, establishing a sense of continuity between the two papacies.
Czerny named this continuity explicitly when he said, “In Dilexi te, Pope Leo joins Pope Francis in declaring: There will be no peace as long as the poor and the planet are neglected and abused.”
The cardinal then summarized the core of the exhortation: “Only a society with the discarded at its center can be truly peaceful, and only a world of such societies can be at peace.”
Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic