Yesterday, on the memorial of St. John Henry Newman, Pope Leo’s apostolic exhortation to all Christians on love for the poor, Dilexi Te, was published online. I’d been eagerly waiting for this document, and I quickly immersed myself in it. What I found is a text that continues directly on from the very last homily of Pope Francis. In April, the pontiff of blessed memory wrote that “the message of Easter” is that “we must look for him elsewhere”; indeed, “we must look for him without ceasing.” We must seek him “everywhere except in the tomb,” but most especially in “those who suffer.” Francis left us with a desire to find Christ in everyone, but especially in the poor.

Well, here we are six months later, and as I open up Dilexi Te, I find this remarkable paragraph:

Love for the Lord, then, is one with love for the poor. The same Jesus who tells us, “The poor you will always have with you” (Mt 26:11), also promises the disciples: “I am with you always” (Mt 28:20). We likewise think of his saying: “Just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40). This is not a matter of mere human kindness but a revelation: contact with those who are lowly and powerless is a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history. In the poor, he continues to speak to us. (DT 5)

Not only are we here energetically walking a Bergoglian path. This paragraph is also deeply reminiscent of one that St. John Paul II wrote at the turn of the millennium—I seem to never tire of quoting it—which goes like this:

If we have truly started out anew from the contemplation of Christ, we must learn to see him especially in the faces of those with whom he himself wished to be identified: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me” (Mt 25:35-37). This Gospel text is not a simple invitation to charity: it is a page of Christology which sheds a ray of light on the mystery of Christ. (Novo Millennio Ineunte 49)

Leo certainly knows the intertextuality, for he himself quotes NMI 49 (see DT 79). Yet he decides to give the presentation his own twist and let his own words stand near the beginning of his exhortation. He frames things in his own terms. Not only is the evangelical proposal “not a simple invitation to charity,” it’s also not “a matter of mere human kindness”; not only is it in fact “a page of Christology,” it’s also “a revelation.” What’s put before us is “a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history.” It’s not just beneficence; it’s not simply a moral consequence of the Gospel. What we’re talking about is something grander. It’s action utterly drenched in—saturated with an infinite supply of—the reality of Christian contemplation.

A contemplative focus

Alleviating all the suffering of poverty and working for the liberation of those who suffer is not a merely secular or temporal matter. We must resist every temptation to reduce the poor to a “sociological category” (DT 110). Leo insists on this. He stresses “the need to go back and re-read the Gospel, lest we risk replacing it with the wisdom of this world” (DT 15). What we find in the New Testament is the contemplation of Christ:

Precisely in order to share the limitations and fragility of our human nature, he himself became poor and was born in the flesh like us. We came to know him in the smallness of a child laid in a manger and in the extreme humiliation of the cross, where he shared our radical poverty, which is death. (DT 16)

But even though as a Christian we may start with Jesus, our vision expands:

As we contemplate Christ’s love, “we too are inspired to be more attentive to the sufferings and needs of others, and confirmed in our efforts to share in his work of liberation as instruments for the spread of his love.” (DT 2, quoting Dilexit Nos 171)

Throughout Dilexi Te, Leo reiterates this logic. There are numerous ecclesial movements that have been “deeply rooted in contemplation of the cross” (DT 61). Yet they are movements. They don’t stay at the foot of the cross. They move towards others. For example, Basil the Great “saw no contradiction between the monks’ life of prayer and contemplation and their work on behalf of the poor” (DT 53); whether contemplation or care, “everything was an expression of the same love for Christ” (DT 54). Bernard of Clairvaux attests that “contemplation does not exclude mercy, but demands it as its purest fruit” (DT 58). Contemplation and action form a pair.

It is for this reason that Pope Leo repeats his predecessor’s assertion that “true love is always contemplative” and thus it “permits us to serve the other not out of necessity or vanity, but rather because he or she is beautiful above and beyond mere appearances” (DT 101, quoting Evangelii Gaudium 119). When we stop and appreciate the beauty of other persons, it is love which “contemplates other persons as ends in themselves” rather than just means (Amoris Laetitia 129). Contemplative love finds an extramental reality worth protecting and promoting for itself. This reaches a peak when it is not just the human person, but the Christological person—the Christ in the poor, the suffering Christ in his members today, the Lord of history.

Where the Lord of history is found

This is where the restlessness noted by Pope Francis comes in. Christ is no longer in the tomb. But he is with us. He is among us. The Lord is not just in heaven. He is in history.

The poor are, in Leo’s abrupt phrase, “the very ‘flesh’ of Christ” (DT 110; cf. DT 103). In John Paul II’s words, they show us the “face” of Christ (NMI 49). Whether we utter the first or the second of these formulas, we refer to material poverty. But in an evangelical mindset, we also intend a multiplicity—“many forms of poverty” that reach beyond the common definition of the word: marginalization, vulnerability, a lack of any kind of freedom (DT 9). We’ll find that there is Christology waiting for us in “those who are discriminated against and oppressed” and in “the weakest” (DT 16).

Marginalized, discriminated against, those who are weakest: it might occur to us that these terms denote, well, terms. They reference terminuses, endpoints, extremities. They indicate a road to travel. This can only mean that there are positionality and directionality to God’s love that is revealed in history, and the trick is to always identify, in whatever complex situations arise, the positions and directions. It is there that Jesus is present in a special way, quite gratuitously and far beyond anything we might have predicted beforehand.

It is Christ whom we encounter. As Leo notes:

When the Church kneels beside a leper, a malnourished child or an anonymous dying person, she fulfills her deepest vocation: to love the Lord where he is most disfigured. (DT 52)

In another timely example, the reverse can also be true: “in every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself who knocks at the door of the community” (DT 75). It is Christ. It is Christ.

Many saints and witnesses—far too many to name here—have accordingly “discovered that the poorest are not only objects of our compassion, but teachers of the Gospel. It is not a question of ‘bringing’ God to them, but of encountering him among them” (DT 79). This stresses not only the fact that by acting for the sake of someone, we do them good. It also points out that the greatest activity of all is Christ’s.

The most agency in history is Christ’s. Anything that impedes this or fails to acknowledge it is mistaken. Marginalized and suffering individuals and communities are “subjects capable of creating their own culture” and not just “objects of charity on the part of others” (DT 100). As vital as it is to highlight almsgiving (DT 115–120) and the undoing of social structures of sin (DT 90–98), neither of these will ever take away from the agency of the oppressed. Nor will the actions of others ever eliminate the great mystery of the poor as “agents of evangelization and of comprehensive human promotion” (DT 100). Through the poor, Christ can “speak to us” (DT 5). In the poor is Christ. But so, too, in the poor Christ is.

Those who found the Lord of history

Throughout his apostolic exhortation, Pope Leo offers a fairly long list of discoverers of the truth about the Lord of history. I don’t have time to explore them all. Indeed, even if I had the time, I’m competent to discuss few of them. Still, I would note two things. The first is that one of the discoverers appears to be the Second Vatican Council itself (DT 84). The second is that Leo speaks in this context of “Charles de Foucauld among the communities of the Sahara” (DT 79). This is not the first time that the current pope has spoken of Br. Charles of Jesus; there was another instance in September. Yet here the allusion is particularly apt. I’d like to offer some words on it.

Br. Charles went to French-colonized Algeria. There he found Christ in the soldiers and the local Arabic Muslims. But this didn’t satisfy him. Eventually, he travelled deeper into the Sahara. There, beneath a millennium of Arabic conquest, he found and lived as one among the Tuareg. As Pope Francis remarked, it was “only in identifying with the least [that Charles] bec[a]me the brother of all” (Fratelli Tutti 287).

So, St. Charles de Foucauld’s was no flattened spirituality of finding Jesus in everyone tout court. Rather, his spiritual experience, by preference and intensity, finds Jesus in the last to be respected, the last to be heard, the poor, the excluded, and the marginalized. He goes the distance.

At the same time, Charles is one of those who discovered the agency of the oppressed and the subjecthood of the other. He went first to the Tuareg to help them. With all his French colonial energy, he had plans of beneficence and historical consolidation. It was only after they saved him from death that he discovered that they could help him, too. He could enter into a mutual, not merely paternalistic, relationship with them. They could evangelize him. They were not just the suffering or marginal flesh of Christ; after that first Easter, the flesh has been alive as the Lord of history.

No doubt it is for reasons like this that Pope Leo concludes his apostolic exhortation by telling us that Christ speaks into historical reality his preference for the poor, marginalized, vulnerable, and suffering.

Jesus’ words are addressed personally to each of them: “I have loved you” (Rev 3:9). (DT 121)