Jeremy Berg

On his Substack, my teacher, Scot McKnight, is walking through and summarizing the recent encyclical by Pope Leo XIV, “Dilexi Te: Apostolic Exhortation on Love for the Poor.” The universal church can learn much from the official thinking of the Roman Catholic Church on what the Bible demands of Christians pertaining to the poor.

It’s alarming, however, seeing how many Catholics today have, like white Evangelicals, exchanged loyalty to Jesus and the Bible (and the Pope!) for loyalty to right wing political tribalism. Jesus words in Matthew 23:23 should shake us all to the core and make us rethink our allegiances:

“Frauds! You keep meticulous account books, tithing on every nickel and dime you get, but on the meat of God’s Law, things like JUSTICE and COMPASSION and ALLEGIANCE [to Jesus above all]—the absolute basics!—you carelessly take it or leave it… Do you know how silly you look?” (Matt 23:23 The Message with some tweaks).

The Bible is very clear and consistent on how we are to love the poor and pursue justice. Unfortunately, the very Biblical and Christian ideas you are going to read below is the very stuff that has been branded “leftist” or “marxist” or “socialist” or “woke” or “anti-American” or worse in our day. I know, because I have taught this stuff in a university class at an Evangelical school, and paid a price. It’s costly to stand by the most basic teachings of Jesus these days in some Christian quarters. So, read on if you dare.

From Scot McKnight’s Substack — subscribe today!

In his recent wonderful encyclical Pope Leo XIV quotes Pope Francis that we, the privileged, need to be “evangelized by the poor.” By this he means we need to become a people that treats the poor as subjects with agency, ideas, a voice, and practices rather than as objects of our charity. Genuine reality for the church is found at the “line of scrimmage” and in the “scrum of life,” not reductionistically on the page, on the screen, and in conversations over coffee or beers.

Only in the scrum do we become attentive to the poor. Only in the scrum will we hear their voices and be able to work together for economic justice. I am reading Pope Leo’s new Dilexi Te: Apostolic Exhortation on Love for the Poor. (As I have written already, the Latin title comes from the “First and Last’s” word to the church at Philadelphia. There, in Revelation 3:9, we read “I have loved you,” which in Latin reads ego dilexi te.)

In the scrum the RCC has learned about the margins. “The church’s social doctrine also emerged from this matrix [or scrum]. Its analysis of Christian revelation in the context of modern social, labor, economic and cultural issues would not have been possible without the contribution of the laity, men and women alike, who grappled with the great issues of their time.” He contends that the “church’s Magisterium in the past 150 years is a veritable treasury of significant teachings concerning the poor.” The pervasive denominationalism that the American church lives within has prevented Protestants in particular from knowing about and learning from the Roman Catholic teachings on social justice. Leo mentions many moments and writings from within the RCC in the last sections of his encyclical.

One theme that emerges from these teachings is the identification of Christ with the poor, as interpreted by many according to Matthew 25:31–46. This theme is an early theme he develops in paragraphs 83 through 85. But it is the “Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes” that deserves a slow-down so we can listen, and it has to do with divinely-created rights for all humans. 

God destined the earth and all it contains for all people and nations so that all created things would be shared fairly by all humankind under the guidance of justice tempered by charity… In their use of things people should regard the external goods they lawfully possess as not just their own but common to others as well, in the sense that they can benefit others as well as themselves. Therefore, everyone has the right to possess a sufficient amount of the earth’s goods for themselves and their family… Persons in extreme necessity are entitled to take what they need from the riches of others… By its nature, private property has a social dimension that is based on the law of the common destination of earthly goods. Whenever the social aspect is forgotten, ownership can often become the object of read and a source of serious disorder.

This from the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council. Right here we are to render decision and shape our practices. If we agree, we are changed; if we do not agree, we become complicit in the economic system.

At this point the expression becomes the divine “preferential option for the poor.” Saint John Paul II, in his Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, wrote, “Today, furthermore, given the worldwide dimension which the social question has assumed, this love of preference for the poor, and the decisions which it inspires in us, cannot but embrace the immense multitudes of the hungry, the needy, the homeless, those without medical care and, above all, those without hope of a better future. It is impossible not to take account of the existence of these realities. To ignore them would mean becoming like the ‘rich man’ who pretended not to know the beggar Lazarus lying at his gate (Lk 16:19–31).”

At the heart of the systemic problem is work, or labor, or jobs, and the wages that attend what humans do. The work of many does not compensate them sufficiently, while the work of others makes for a life of daily luxuries. He turns to Benedict XVI and to Francis. Here we see the fundamental concerns to address: 

“Unemployment, 
underemployment, 
unjust wages 
and sub-standard living conditions.” 

These are the scrum. Francis said “charity has the power to change reality; it is a genuine force for change in history.”

The plea of this encyclical is to “denounce the ‘dictatorship of an economy that kills’” and this dictatorship is “a new tyranny… wait[ing] for invisible market forces to resolve everything.” Systemic thinking emerges from the scrum, too: “social sin consolidates a ‘structure of sin’ within society.” 

It is true that systemic problems require systemic solutions, but systemic problems begin exactly where systemic solutions begin, namely, in the concrete actions of individual people in local communities designed to make an impact on the system. Systems cannot be swapped like hard drives in a computer. The current system is one in “with its emphasis on success and self-reliance, does not appear to favor an investment in efforts to help the slow, the weak or the less talented to find opportunities in life.”

Our system favors those with the conditions, the life situations, the education, and the ambition to succeed in that system. But we need to see that most with an unfortunate “life situation” do not succeed in that system. Day by day the system can change. The system is not just. It is not Christian. It is not consistent with the kingdom vision of Jesus.

These are lessons the Catholics have learned in the scrum of life. At the line of scrimmage.