In his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te [I have loved you], Pope Leo XIV sets the tone for his pontificate with a resounding affirmation: love for the poor is not optional. It is the unmistakable mark of a Church, faithful to the gospel. In a world where human life is often treated as disposable—commodified, politicised, or simply ignored—Pope Leo’s message comes as a prophetic reminder that the Christian vocation begins with love made visible in justice and compassion.
Echoing the words and witness of Pope Francis, his predecessor, Pope Leo writes that the poor “are not a sociological category but the very flesh of Christ.” To neglect them, he warns, is to turn our faith into abstraction. “No Christian can regard the poor simply as a societal problem; they are part of our family. They are one of us.”
This insistence places Dilexi Te firmly within the Church’s long-standing “option for the poor,” while extending it into new and urgent contexts. For Pope Leo, the “dictatorship of an economy that kills” is the reality of today that prizes profit over people. He criticises ideologies that praise the market’s invisible hand but avoid taking responsibility for the suffering it causes. In contrast, the pope advocates for a different kind of economy: one grounded in the gospel’s principles of gift, solidarity, and respect for human dignity.
Pope Leo’s reflection extends beyond the evil of poverty. His concern reaches into the political and social frameworks that sustain inequality, exploitation, and exclusion. His words on migration challenge the world and the Church. “Where the world sees threats,” he writes, “the Church sees children; where walls are built, she builds bridges,”—words that hit hard on the perpetrators of an unjust society. In the faces of migrants and refugees, the Church encounters Christ himself, rejected and on the move.
The pope’s appeal is clear: the Church must remain a living sign of God’s love in a culture that too easily discards what is inconvenient or unprofitable. This includes not only the unborn and the aged, but also the unemployed, the migrant, the prisoner, the homeless, and all those deprived of dignity. Our worth “depends on the answers we give to these questions: Do the weak have the same dignity as ourselves? Are those born with fewer opportunities of lesser value as human beings?”
In Hong Kong and across Asia, where economic progress coexists with growing inequality, Dilexi Te invites reflection on how Christian discipleship translates into social conversion. It challenges us to move beyond charity into communion—to see service to the poor not as a work of generosity, but as an act of faith.
Pope Leo’s first exhortation, like that of Pope Francis, is not a political manifesto but a Gospel summons. It is the Church’s option for life—against the world’s manipulation of it. To love the poor, the excluded, and the vulnerable is not merely to imitate Christ; it is to recognise Christ in them. jose, CMF
