In Christian humanism, the range of the word poverty is very wide. It goes from the despair of those who suffer poverty because of others or through misfortune, to those who freely choose poverty as a path of beatitude — a free choice that often becomes the main road to liberate those who did not choose it.

In the Church there have always been, and still are, thousands of men and women who made themselves poor in the hope of being called “blessed” (DT, n. 21), and who later realised that this first beatitude of Jesus could only be heard by becoming companions of those who know only the dark side of poverty.
If this chosen poverty — this down payment of the Kingdom of Heaven — were to disappear from the earth because of some “millennium goal” (n. 10) had been achieved, that day would truly bring bad news for humanity, which, without evangelical poverty, would find itself infinitely poorer and more miserable, without even knowing it.

Dilexi te (DT) by Pope Leo XIV speaks mainly of bad poverty — which we could also call misery or deprivation — to urge us to care for it and not to “lower our guard” (n. 12). But it does not forget the beautiful poverty of the Gospel, especially in its long sections devoted to the biblical vision of poverty.
From the Gospels and from life we know that it is impossible to separate the evangelical view and judgment on poverty from that on wealth (n. 11). Poverty is not an individual status, a personal trait, nor “a bitter fate” (n. 14). It is a distorted relationship with people, institutions and goods; it is a relational evil, the result of collective and individual choices made by real people and real institutions.

If some people find themselves, without having chosen it, in a condition of misery, this is deeply connected with other people and institutions who possess excessive and often unjust wealth, and who almost always have chosen it. This is not to say that your wealth is the cause of my poverty — a thesis that lies at the root of much social envy — but only to acknowledge the essentially relational (n. 64), social and political nature of human poverty and wealth, especially of women (n. 12), girls and boys.
That is why it is not easy for the Church to speak of poverty and of the poor: it must keep these two dimensions of poverty — the good and the bad — in vital tension, because if one is left out, it is not just a grave mistake; it is a departure from the Gospel.

The matter becomes even more difficult if we follow to the end the paradoxical logic of the Beatitudes and realise that among those poor called “blessed” by Jesus there are not only the Francis-type poor, who chose poverty, but also the Job-type poor, who only suffered it. And there, being able to call both “blessed”, without shame, is a challenge, because “Blessed are the poor” becomes also the beatitude of children and of the dying.

Dilexi te is both an appeal to Christian action and a meditation on poverty from the perspective of the Old and New Testaments, Paul, the Fathers, and the Church’s tradition, with special attention to its charisms that have placed the poor and poverty at the centre — Francis of Assisi (n. 64) and his many brothers and sisters. It is also a reflection on the specific poverty of Jesus himself (nn. 20–22).
It is important that this first exhortation of Pope Leo is in full continuity — even in its title, which is the twin of Dilexit nos — with Pope Francis’s magisterium on poverty (n. 3), the theme at the heart of his pontificate.
Pope Francis chose the place of Lazarus (Lk 16), under the table of the rich man, as his point of view on the world. From there he saw people and things differently — among them, prisons (n. 62) — than those who look at the world sitting beside the rich man. With Dilexi te, Leo tells us that he wants to continue to look at the Church and the world together with Francis and with the Lazaruses of history. And that is truly good news.

“The poor,” he writes, “are not here by chance or by a blind and bitter fate” (n. 14). Yet, he continues, “there are still some who dare to affirm this, showing blindness and cruelty.”
It is significant that Pope Leo links this “blindness and cruelty”, again in continuity with Francis, to the “false vision of meritocracy”, because this is an ideology in which “it seems that only those who have succeeded in life are deserving” (n. 14).
Thus, meritocracy is a false vision. The ideology of meritocracy is, in fact, one of the principal “structures of sin” (nn. 90 ff.) that generate exclusion and then attempt to legitimise it ethically.

One final note. Today there exists a great secular magisterium on unchosen poverty. It is that of A. Sen, M. Yunus, Esther Duflo (three Nobel laureates), and many other scholars who have taught us many new things about poverty.
They have shown us that poverty is a deprivation of freedom, of capabilities, and thus an absence of capital (social, health, family, educational, etc.) that “prevents us from living the life we wish to live” (A. Sen).
The absence of capital appears as a lack of flows (income), but it is only by healing the capital that tomorrow’s flows can be improved. And it is towards this capital that “almsgiving” (nn. 115 ff.) should be directed, as the many charisms of the Church have done for centuries (nn. 76 ff.), fighting misery “in capital terms”, by building schools or hospitals.
We hope that future pontifical documents will include this secular magisterium on poverty, now essential for understanding and healing it. And we also hope that the secular world will discover the beauty of chosen poverty.
Because for the world, even for its best part, poverty is only an evil to be eradicated. And that is far too little.

See, Luigino Bruni: Beati i poveri, non la miseria