Pope Leo XIV’s recent apostolic exhortation, Dilexi te, reminds us that in the poor we find a privileged place to meet Christ himself. Indeed, as Leo writes, echoing St. John Chrysostom, “if the faithful do not encounter Christ in the poor who stand at the door, they will not be able to worship him even at the altar.”
It is commonplace these days to view the challenge of poverty primarily as a function of distribution; that is, of how to get material goods from where they are in abundance to where they are most in want. And so we look for solutions to this problem in various government programs, tax policies, models of economic growth, laws prohibiting or incentivizing certain economic behaviors, and the like.
And that’s good. A just society will provide ample support for those genuinely in need without creating unnecessary dependency among the recipients of that assistance. For the most part, almost no one wants to be abandoned entirely to their own devices and almost no one wants to be utterly dependent upon the state.
But the space between those extremes is very broad. So we debate whether it is more effective to invest in a safety net to catch people who fall through the proverbial cracks or to invest in programs and institutions which might prevent people from falling through them in the first place.
And we have disagreements about how each of these strategies might be employed and by whom and at whose expense.
These debates are important because the policies which emerge from these debates are important, both reflecting and shaping the character and aspirations of our nation. As Christian citizens, we must not ignore the good of the communities to which we belong and that means taking care that our laws are both humane and just.
But as Christians – particularly as Christians in a nation as affluent as our own – we must always be wary of losing the immediacy of the Gospel’s exhortation to take care of the poor.