An article by Prof. M.P. Dalbem CSsR, published on the blog of the Alfonsiana Academy
One element that permeates the entire document of Pope Leo XIV is undoubtedly the ‘preferential option for the poor’. This is not a marginal concept in the construction of the text’s message, but a central point that summarises the content of Dilexi te [= DT] in missionary terms.
As the document itself points out, care for the poor is a characteristic that has been present since the dawn of the Christian faith. Pope Prevost devotes ample space within the document to a sort of “history” of the Christian community’s care for the poor, gathering examples from the lives of various saints and from ecclesial experiences.
This is an authentic movement of the Spirit that configures the “body-community” to “Christ-head” in the order of compassion. However, although care for the poor has always been present in the history of the Church (cf. DT, n. 15), its formulation as a “preferential option” is modern. Prompted by the reaffirmation in Gaudium et spes of the Church’s commitment to the poorest and to social justice, the Latin American Church, in the Episcopal Assemblies of Puebla (1968) and Medellín (1979), speaks explicitly of the preferential option as a response to the structural inequalities present on the continent.
The preferential option for the poor is, in reality, the concrete expression of welcoming the “suffering face of Christ”, painfully evident in the lives of those who are marginalised and crucified daily by unjust and exclusionary social forces. This is not merely a human option or superficial charity, but touches on the very core of Christian revelation: ‘We are not in the realm of charity, but of revelation: contact with those who have no power or greatness is a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history. In the poor, He still has something to say to us’ (DT, n. 5).
Gustavo Gutiérrez, a leading figure in Latin American theology, states that ‘the preferential option for the poor is implicit in the Christological faith in that God who became poor for us’[1]. In the order of Revelation, the recognition of the face of Christ in the poor is communication from God. ‘The poor evangelise us’[2]. For Leo XIV, the preferential option for the poor is not something marginal, but a central element, because God’s love is manifested in a privileged way in the commitment to the poor and the abandoned, who, in turn, cannot be reduced to a mere sociological category, but are ‘the flesh of Christ.’
“For us Christians, the question of the poor leads us back to the essence of our faith. […] The reality is that for Christians, the poor are not a sociological category, but the very flesh of Christ. In fact, it is not enough to simply state in general terms the doctrine of the incarnation of God; to truly enter into this mystery, we must specify that the Lord becomes flesh that is hungry, thirsty, sick, imprisoned. ‘A poor Church for the poor begins with going towards the flesh of Christ. If we go towards the flesh of Christ, we begin to understand something, to understand what this poverty of the Lord is. And this is not easy’ (DT, n. 110).
The use of this ecclesiological-Eucharistic image, “the flesh of Christ”, to refer to the poor has great theological force: they bear the filial dignity mistreated by the sufferings inflicted by injustice. Thus, we can affirm that one cannot truly understand the Mystery of the Incarnation of Christ without the poor being present in the horizon of understanding.
From an ecclesiological point of view, Leo XIV further deepens this relationship by stating that “Christians cannot consider the poor as merely a social problem: they are a ‘family matter’. They are ‘one of us’” (DT, n. 104). With this statement, the Pope seems to bring the issue to the level of the unity of the body of Christ, where when one member suffers, the whole body suffers. In this way, the social question takes on greater depth, because it is no longer a matter of mere theorising or analysing statistical figures, often a fertile ground for generalisations and massification, but the life of a brother or sister is at stake, a living part of the body of Christ to which every disciple belongs.
In times marked by neoliberal fallacies, by erroneous visions based on meritocratic theories, in contexts of environmental crises and wars that lead more and more people to live below the poverty line, in cultures that foment individualism and closure towards others, recovering the preferential option for the poor as an essential element of the identity of Christ’s disciples is a sine qua non condition for faith to be lived in an authentic and prophetic way (continued 2/5).
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[1] G. Gutiérrez, Teología de la liberación. Perspectivas, Sígueme, Salamanca 1972, 307. [‘The preferential option for the poor is implicit in the Christological faith in that God who became poor for us’].
[2] G. Gutiérrez, Parlare di Dio dalla sofferenza dell’innocente, Sígueme, Salamanca 1986, 21. [‘The poor evangelise us’].
