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Dilexi Te: On Love for the Poor, with Fr. Cristian Mendoza Ovando

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When Pope Leo XIV issued his first apostolic exhortation, he chose a title drawn from the Book of Revelation: Dilexi te — "I have loved you." Those words, addressed to a community with little power and little standing, become in this document Christ's word to the poor of every age. The poor are not a problem to be managed. They are, the Pope insists, the place where Christ continues to speak.

But who exactly are the poor? That question turns out to be less obvious than it sounds. Poverty, as Fr. Cristian Mendoza Ovando helps us see in this conversation, is not one thing. It is material and spiritual, negative and positive, something suffered and — in a different sense — something chosen. Any serious reading of Dilexi te has to reckon with that complexity.

Fr. Cristian, who teaches at Santa Croce in Rome, joins me today following a lecture he gave on Dilexi te at the University of Notre Dame.

Follow-up Resources:

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

SPEAKER_02

From the McGrimouth Institute for Church Life and OSV podcast, this is Church Life Today. I'm Leonard DeLorenzo. When Pope Leo XIV issued his first apostolic exhortation, he chose a title Drummond from the Book of Revelation, the Lexite. I have loved you. Those words addressed to a community with little power and little standing become in this document Christ's word to the poor of every age. The poor are not a problem to be managed. They are, the Pope insists, the place where Christ continues to speak. But who exactly are the poor? It is material and spiritual, negative and positive, something suffered and in a different sense, something chosen. Any serious reading of de lexite has to reckon with that complexity. Father Christian, who teaches at Santa Croce in Rome, joins me today following a lecture he gave on de lexite at the University of Notre Dame. Father Christian, welcome to the show. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00

My pleasure to be here with you.

SPEAKER_02

It's so nice to have you. So I would love to talk about uh your thoughts and your work, especially on this apostolic exhortation, the lexite. But I thought a way for us maybe to begin to speak about that would be to ask you to help us put this into context and probably in a couple of different ways. And the first would be what you bring out in some of your writing and speaking on this work, which is the placement of Pope Leo XIV's writing here within the Leonine tradition. Could you help us to understand as you as you argue and as you draw out how Pope Leo XIV intentionally places what he's writing here in reference to Leo XIII and the whole Leonine tradition that develops from?

SPEAKER_00

Thank you very much, Leonard. Yes, um, think that the Pope decided to have this name, Leo. And he recalls directly to Leo XIII, as he said also in one of the first speeches he gave. I wanted to come back to this Leonine tradition. I want to think about society, I want to, in a way, recover the thought of Leo XIII in this world today, so many years after that old pontificate, 150 years ago almost. And it is because um the Pope wanted to do that that we need to understand the Lexite in this context. He's the first apostolic exhortation of a pope that wants to recover the Catholic social teaching. And Leo XIII was very special. Um he's um pope who wrote no less than one 110 encyclical letters. That's like four every year.

SPEAKER_02

It's incredible.

SPEAKER_00

They were shorter than now we have, but they were very powerful. Many of them were related to the issue of the relationship between the church and the state. And those letters are important because they had all um a sort of new presentation of the Catholic social teaching. If you recall, Pope Leo XIII was a cardinal of Perugia when Pius IX issued this syllabus of erroribus, that is like a list of errors. And they these errors were totally new. The church had never spoken about those. We have 80 points in the syllabus, and only four were mentioned in the past. So Pius IX gave this condemnation of modernity in in an important moment of history, but then Leo XIII said, well, maybe we should not just do a list of errors, but to propose something new. And this, I think, was very smart. And this is part of the way in which the Pope tried to redo Catholic social teaching at that time was to propose a new sort of what we would call today sociology, based on revelation and based on natural law. Because it is true, the Bible doesn't tell you how to live exactly, it doesn't tell you where to work or how to pay taxes, but we know that Jesus paid taxes and we know that Jesus worked. So if we want to imitate our Lord, in the Bible we have many things that help us, you see.

SPEAKER_02

How would you understand as you look at and and study Leo the Thirteenth's uh time that he's writing into in relation to or distinct from Leo XIV, that is to say, our time and the sort of social conditions that he's speaking to?

SPEAKER_00

Well, in that time, Leo XIII had to deal, on the one hand, with a movement of people who would come to work in the cities. And this created two sorts of movements. If you have many poor people who were working in the fields, they came to the city to find misery because they needed to find a job. And if you think the city of Manchester like multiplied its population by three in only like 50 years, because a lot of people came. This made um two possible problems. One, the owners of the means of production, having so many people to work, they just forced them to work a lot. And if they didn't want, well, you get another employee because it's very easy to get them. And this was what the Pope in that time called the capitalists because it was like an unbridled capitalism. It was not the production of wealth as we understand it today. But on the other side, he also saw that some socialist theories were trying to take advantage of these poor people who were in the cities and telling them, well, we will save you from your condition, but you need to give us your children, we will educate them, and then we will fight against private property. So the Pope saw those two movements as something that is not in agreement with the dignity of the human being. And he criticized both. In this sense, the Pope is very authentic. He says, I'm not taking any political or economic view, but I'm criticizing those two things. At the same time, Leo Trutin is a deep intellectual, and so he is thinking, and in this point he relates a lot to Pope Leo Fertin, because he knows rationalism, the idea that only what I can argue and demonstrate is true, and scientificism, the idea that only what I can prove through science is true, is something that would cut God off my thought. And so I don't want that. And and we should be alert, we should be attentive, not to forgive, uh to forget, I'm sorry, that God is present in everything we do. Pope Leo 14 is facing the same issues because we see that the world may create a capitalism where a lot of people is just cut off, and the world may have like socioeconomic movements that concentrate the power in the political authorities, and you have two kinds of countries that can do this. But at the same time, with the development of this new artificial intelligence, you can create a world where you are fine that redeems you from this real world, that entertains you, and then you don't want to come back to this world.

SPEAKER_02

You escape.

SPEAKER_00

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_00

It's like a new sort of drug, and you just go away and you're happy there. Yeah. But you can be very isolated, you see.

SPEAKER_02

And this satisfies the longing, the need, the urgency for a fuller type of healing and wholeness that we would recognize as salvation. Exactly. It becomes a substitute for that.

SPEAKER_00

Especially because if you are able to create your world, you avoid sufferance, you avoid problems, you avoid others, you avoid many things that are part of the human life. And when you embrace sufferance, when you embrace facing others, when you embrace the capacity of taking the real life that you have and your issues, you grow, you develop, you work harder, you have a new vision of the world. I think almost every pope, when they started their pontificate, they start with a letter on social issues. And since 1775 to 1978, I mean almost 300 years, the popes were just uh 200 years, the popes were starting with these letters on social issues. So it's not a surprise that Pope Leo 14 did this, but the only Pope who stopped this was um John Paul II because he wanted to start with Redemptor Ominis, this encyclical that recall us that well, is the redemptor of man, is Jesus who can explain us who we are. And and think about this. I mean, Jesus never escaped, he had the power to do it, but he embraced the cross, he was here, he worked, he got tired, he needed to sleep, he needed to eat, he needed to be with others, and this is our model, right?

SPEAKER_02

So to think about, as I said at the beginning, I'd love to think about this or help or ask you to help us think about this work in context. One was in this Leonine tradition, then the other is in its more immediate tradition, which is following, as Pope Leo XIV does, Pope Francis. The encyclical that comes immediately before this apostolic exhortation is very similar in name, of course, Delexicnos, which Pope Francis trains our attention on the sacred heart of Jesus. And here, this apostolic exhortation, which Francis had gotten going and Leo XIV made his own and completed, Delexite, um could seem, on the one hand, like a departure from like just treating something else. How do you understand the relationship, if you do, between that encyclical delexit nos and this apostolic exhortation, delexite?

SPEAKER_00

I think you're totally right that the both encyclicals or this apostolic exhortation and the encyclical delexit nos are related. Think about this. Um if we think why Pope Leo Fertin got the name, is because he wants to face the way in which we are creating or ordering society today. Why did he start it with the lexicte? Well, because he is getting a whole inheritance from Pope Francis, uh, who had a very important concept that is compassion. If I if I see, Pope Francis said, if I see someone who is suffering and I live my life giving the back to that sufferance, it means that um I have a sort of sickness. And and this is interesting because if you think about this, um the problems of the world are problems of people who are like us. The problems of our family, they touch us a lot. But of course, maybe the problems of our neighbor are less important than the problems of my son. Now, if we are Christians and we believe that we are a whole family, so in a way, the problems of others should also become our problems. And this is not just because we think that it is like that. Imagine that I give you an example. Imagine that you have a cat that is sitting in a corner of your room and you have a cat that is looking through the window, and you say, Well, the cat in the window is smart. Well, cats are not intelligent, they're not intelligent, they don't reason. But you think that the one looking at the window acts as an intelligent being. When we do things that are things like God would do them, it is not that we think that we are becoming saints, but we are really, because we are transformed by baptism. And if we perform the things that God wants, it's not like the cat story, it's true and it's reality. So if I have compassion, I am just like God who had mercy on us, who was able to be merciful, and he took the mystery of our lives and put it in his heart. And this is something that is divine. That's why what Pope Francis is saying is if you arrive to have compassion, compati, to suffer with the other, means that somehow you are acting like God. And you can understand that the grace of God is passing through your life and your heart. What is the consequence of this? The consequence of this is of course that then I help others. Because if I am not compassionate, if I don't have the motivation, the movement, then I do nothing. But if I feel this compassion, then I try to do something because the faith is not an idea. The faith is also to put in practice my love in specific acts and works and deeds.

SPEAKER_02

And it seems that the through line or perhaps the opening of the Lexite, the idea here, is something very direct, very profound, but very simply stated that the love for Christ is inseparable from the love for the poor. And I think as you were helping us to think about here, compassion, to suffer with the other, to place yourself in some ways in the position of the other, is in fact to enter into something of God's love.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And I think that to read the lexite, there could be three things that are important to consider. First, that when the church is speaking about the poor, is not only thinking about those who have no means. The church is thinking about uh material poverty, but also spiritual poverty and also relational poverty. And in this sense, we are all poor. And the church is telling us that because we can be poor, we should not be like um detached from God. We should always look for Him because we need others also. Um this is the first idea. The second idea to read the Lexite is that if I want to give charity, then I should give what is mine. I cannot do charity with things that are not mine, because that will be unjust and uncharitable. Therefore, I I really need to give something that that belongs to me that is costly when I when I try to help others out of charity. The third idea is that to live justice, I need to give the others what is them due. I mean what is what belongs to them. I I cannot think that I'm doing justice if I give them less um than is due, or if I give them more, if I give them more is charity, if I give them less is uh lack of justice. So I need to give them what is theirs. Now, why the Lexitas says that when we give to the poor, we are not giving them something that belongs to us, but we are giving something that belongs to them. Well, the way to understand this is to think that when you see someone who has lost his or her dignity because he is in trouble or he got into a vice or he's extremely poor, and you help him or her to recover the dignity of human being is not a matter of charity, but of justice, because the dignity as a human person belongs to this person. And sometimes we think that it's all about giving something. No, actually, it's much more about taking people seriously. Like when you see someone that is sad, that is close to your office, and and is really in a bad situation, giving your time, your attention, your affection, your interest. And well, there are many ways to do this. Um, one of my friends, she's a businesswoman, and she decided to arrive to the office every day and to say hello to one of the employees she had never met in the past because she's the CEO of a big company. And that helped her a lot to know people that she had never said hello to, but she made a day of these persons. And I think it's a small thing, but sometimes we're too busy. We need to answer too many messages, and we should stop more and trying to help others in what they need. People many times don't need money. What they need is a little bit of affection and respect.

SPEAKER_02

And this is part of the challenges you bring out in your uh lecture on this apostolic exhortation, at least two of the challenges that I noted in what you said. One of the challenges in the Lexite is to speak more accurately about the poor, and you uh allow us to begin to do that in in, as you mentioned, the material and spiritual forms of poverty, and then good material poverty and bad material poverty, good spiritual poverty and bad spiritual poverty. We could talk about that. But um, that's one challenge. And then the second, as you're, as you're leading us to think about already, is the challenge of feeling deeply responsible for others in society. And that is where this, it seems, that the social revolution, not in political sense primarily, not because of an ideological bent, but because of this is how God has loved us, to take us seriously. That in fact, for us to be truly human, as we are called to be, is to take the condition of others seriously, to be feel responsible for them. Talk to us about in this particular work, how you find that to be such a strong and challenging call to us in our day and age, to take very seriously our responsibility for the condition of others.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think this is I I guess one of the hardest um parts of Catholic social teaching. And it recalls this idea on the one hand, I cannot say that I evangelize others and bring, I mean, I bring the news of the gospel and I tell them that they can go to heaven if I don't care about their condition, their situation. Yeah, because we are not angels. We we cannot save people just by grace and not think about the nature. Um, on the other hand, it is important not to say that to evangelize is the same thing that to develop, because then I can develop people, I can make the whole world a super wealthy country, but maybe we don't reach salvation. Maybe because we run a big tree in front of us of this world, we cannot see the forest and we're trapped. So the Christianity is this Christianity is telling you um we should make this earth a better world, and we should do it with others, with everybody. Everybody, with the hands wide open. At the same time, the important thing is not to develop the world, but the important thing is salvation. Now, how can you put those things together, right? It seems that um we to be good Christians we should leave everything, because Jesus asked the young rich men to leave everything and to follow him. But on the other hand, it seems that God wants us to be very wealthy because he made Adam and Eve and He gave them everything. They were the richest ever in the history of the world. So I think it's a very personal call. Think about this. It's true, Jesus asked the young rich men to leave everything and follow him, but he never asked Joseph of Arimathea to leave everything back and to follow him. Actually, that's why Joseph of Arimathea was able to give him a sepulchre. And therefore, God asks some people to do things for him that are very radical. And we have many vocations in the church, to the religious life that they give up everything. Um, we have many people who are asked to keep their goods in the service of God, and this is the thing. It's not in the service of themselves, it's not in the service of their own like position or power, it's in the service of God and for others. And this is something that requires, as Professor Michael Novak said, this exercise of having the social justice as a personal virtue. And then I can think about my life and say, okay, am I responsible in a way for others? Do I give something to someone? And if we're Christians, we should be ready to give something to someone. If you think about this term that we use many times without thinking about it, solidarity. Solidarity, it doesn't mean anything except responsibility. Because the first Christians, when they wanted to buy property, to have a Domus Ecclesiae, a church in a house, they had to buy property, and there were many people that were not relatives. And so the Roman law would not allow you to do that because they were not a family. So each one of the people buying would be responsible. To pay for the totality of the lot they were buying in the case the others never paid. And that's why each person was responsible for the whole. And this kind of contract was called in solidum. And from this it comes the word solidarity, that each one of us is responsible for the whole, the whole of your family, the whole of your workplace, the whole of the church, the whole, and this is very challenging.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. And to think about that in practical terms, what for us as Christians, the challenge for, let's say, the way in which our vision is to develop, the way we see, is if in a normal way, if I see that I have a lack for basic clothing for basic material needs to protect myself, I would be stimulated to act on that, to try to protect myself. But in the Christian vision, to see another who has who lacks that same basic need of basic dignity of proper clothing, of protection against the elements, to be formed by Christ slowly and over time and to act on it is to see that as the same kind of urgent demand on me. Would that be right?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I like a lot of the image of St. Martin of Tours. You may remember that he had a cape and then he cut the cape and he gave half of his cape to a poor.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And you always say, well, come on, he's a sane. He could give everything. Why didn't he just give the whole cape to the poor? Because he was a soldier and he knew that he owned only half of the cape. The other belonged to the army. He could not give what it was not his. And in that way, he was doing charity. He was giving what he was his own, but he was responsible keeping the things that belong to the army. So we should be responsible for our family and for the things we should do. And personally, with the things that belong to us, with what is superfluous, with the things we use, with the things that we don't need, then we should be able to be detached. And this is something that we can do if we think. But now Pope Leo is asking us to do this, to say, okay, am I really following our Lord? Then how should I do it? And then we we need to ask our Lord what to do. And after that, they decisions. Like real, concrete, specific decisions that will somehow free us also from being thinking about things that we don't need. I think this is part of the challenge.

SPEAKER_02

Really wonderful. I want to bring up what I found to be one of the um really strongest and maybe boldest claims in your lecture, which is if I get it, hopefully I get it correct. And if I don't, correct me, please, that you make the claim, it seems, that Christianity consistently lived well necessarily produces, or will lead will more likely let's well, maybe necessarily produces material and social development.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, in the sense that if you think about the first Christians, that way they were poor people, they were just uh a group of fishermen, except for Matthew, that maybe he was a well-to-do man, a tax collector, and therefore considered a sinner. The first Christians and those who were following our Lord were insignificant in the power of the Roman Empire. But it was precisely that time that was chosen by God to have the incarnate Son of God on earth, because the power of the Empire allowed them to spread the news. And in very short time they would move thanks to all the roads that the Romans created, and they would be able to talk to people, thanks also to the common language that the empire imposed in the world. And they were already in the in the palace of the emperor, and therefore they started to recreate a world that was not based on uh earthly power, but it became a vocation. Actually, this is really interesting because this is what um then the in the 15th, 16th century the reformers would see. Like God is calling me to be Christ, therefore, God is calling me to work hard. Yeah, but God is calling me to work hard not to keep the wealth I produce, but to give it to others. And therefore, the Calvinists, for example, they they say, well, if I take an hour that is supposed to be a work hour, and I just rest, I'm taking an hour to God. And therefore, they worked so hard and they saved so much money that they developed their world. Actually, Max Weber said this that the Protestant ethics is the spirit of capitalism. But Max Weber never thought that it was Protestant against Catholics. Actually, in the second edition of his book, Max Weber included two important Catholics, Saint Antonino of Florence and Bernardino of Siena. And why he did that? Because Max Weber, what he admired was the discipline that the Christianity produces in society honesty, work, generosity, constancy. And all this was lived in the cumbans, said Max Weber. But then the reformation took it out to the whole of society. The central virtue of Christianity is not poverty, is not to have or not to have, but to love, charity, to follow the will of God. And if you do that, you will work a lot, you will work more, you will do more things for others, you will be more generous, you will develop others, you will create and have initiative and have a better world. And this you will not do it for your sake or the sake of your family or your group, but for everybody. And that's why Christianity, when it's deeply lived, is something that changes the world, even if the primary purpose of it is not to change the world.

SPEAKER_02

Very well said. Before we conclude here, I'd love to ask you then, because this might be on people's minds, what then would you see as the relationship, the proper relationship for perhaps economic and social development of the church to the state? If the state has certain kind of responsibilities for the uh proper administration of various societies, what is the church's role for the state, or what ought the state look to the church for?

SPEAKER_00

That's so interesting. Um, Ernst Wolkenbuchenforde is a German thinker who said that the state needs a series of characteristics in his citizens that the state cannot produce. Because the state needs hardworking people and he cannot educate them in that. The state needs virtuous people, and the state is not able to educate everybody in virtue. Um, the state needs a lot of other institutions to be the state and to guide towards the common good. And therefore, the state and the church are related in a sense that the state needs the virtues that the church produces in its faithful. And the church produces virtues in its faithful not only to have them as good citizens in the state, but above all to have them as saints walking towards heaven. Now, can the church call to sanctity without giving people the virtue that helped them to be better citizens? No, because we are like the same nature and we cannot distinguish in what we do, our human side and the life of grace is all together.

SPEAKER_02

This world matters, right? Exactly. Yes.

SPEAKER_00

This world matters. And this is not in every religion, because there are many religions that you will see. Well, no, you you should just forget about this world and the passions of this world, or what what is important is your that you belong to a caste, or but no, here is really this world matters, and what we do in this world echoes in eternity, like the movie. And so therefore, we we should think about this life as the beginning of heaven, because in the way in which we behave on earth is the way in which we could continue to behave in the presence of God then later in heaven. That's why heaven is only for those who knew how to be happy on this earth, because this happiness is following Lord, our Lord, at the end. So this is the point. Beautifully said.

SPEAKER_02

Well, Father Christian, thank you for this uh just lovely conversation and especially for all of the work that you've done to help to bring forth uh Pope Leo XIV's work and the tradition out of which it comes. And we look forward to not only what uh the Pope brings us in the coming uh months and years, but your also your own work to help us to understand and to learn better.

SPEAKER_00

My pleasure. It is a great honor to be with you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02

And thanks to all of you as always for joining us on Church Life today. This has been a production of OSV Podcasts. To learn more, visit osvpodcasts.com.