An article by Prof. MP Dalbem CSsR, published on the blog of the Accademia Alfonsiana
This contribution concludes the series of five articles published on the Alphonsian Academy’s blog dedicated to the Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi te, a document initiated by Pope Francis and subsequently completed and promulgated by Pope Leo XIV. This journey is the result of reflections developed by three professors from Alphonsian Academy active in the field of Moral Social Theology: Professors Dalbem, McKeever, and Salutati, each according to their own expertise and research perspectives.
In his first contribution, Professor Dalbem briefly presented the document, focusing on its formal characteristics and main thematic nuclei. In his second contribution, the same author explored the content and roots of what appears to be the focal point and key to the missionary interpretation of the exhortation: the preferential option for the poor. Professor McKeever, in his third contribution, examined Dilexi te‘s contribution to the ongoing debate on Liberation Theology, a field in which the preferential option for the poor has assumed a central role and undergone significant development as a contemporary theological category. Finally, Professor Salutati offers a fourth reflection on the importance of the political dimension of faith, as it emerges from the exhortation and recent Magisterium, as well as its concrete impact on Christian moral action.
At the end of this brief reflective journey, the cry of so many brothers and sisters suffering from poverty emerges with renewed force. This cry cannot be romanticized or interpreted in an alienating way but must be faced in its harsh reality. According to data from the World Bank Group, in 2024, 10% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, surviving on a daily income of just $3; this percentage rises to a staggering 47% if we consider a slightly higher threshold of $8.30 a day, which the same institution defines as the poverty line. In concrete terms, approximately 3.7 billion people are forced to meet all their basic needs on a daily basis with an amount equivalent to the cost of a simple slice of pizza in a shop on the outskirts of Rome. And this is considering only so-called material poverty.
Pope Francis and Pope Leo therefore urge a complex and realistic view of reality, capable of offering adequate responses to the concrete context that presents itself as a challenge to the lived experience of faith in Jesus of Nazareth.
If we take into account the complexity that characterizes the real phenomenon of poverty—neither idealized nor reduced to a mere theoretical abstraction—it becomes clear that it is not limited to the material dimension. Poverty also manifests as relational poverty, experienced in abandonment, loneliness, social invisibility, and indifference; it is rooted and perpetuated within unjust social structures and systems that exclude, maintaining persistent inequalities over time, silencing entire segments of the population and excluding them from access to the most basic means of development and growth. All of this progressively leads to a loss of meaning, despair, and ultimately dehumanization.
In the life of our Institute’s patron saint, Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, it is possible to identify significant traits that point toward a concrete and redemptive approach to interpreting reality in all its complexity. Faced with the concrete suffering of his people, as a bishop, he responded to the urgent need for hunger without giving in to demagogy, distributing goods to those who lacked them; as a jurist and moral theologian, he knew how to interpret and apply the legal instruments at his disposal with balance and skill to benefit the smallest and most vulnerable; as a mystic, he witnessed the closeness of a King who comes down from his castle to dwell beside his servant out of love, a God who makes no distinctions between persons, but loves unconditionally.
Faced with such a complex and multifaceted reality, may our responses have the fragrance, colour and consistency proper to the complexity of the Incarnation: «Whether through your work, or through your commitment to changing unjust social structures, or through that simple, deeply personal and close gesture of help, it will be possible for that poor person to perceive that Jesus’ words are addressed precisely to him: “I have loved you”» ( DT , 121).
