The Unfallen

For a few years in the 1980s, when I was a graduate student at UCLA and had no stipend, I lived in a tenement near the La Brea Tar Pits and paid $105 a month for a studio apartment. It had no kitchen, only a hot plate and mini fridge on a counter beside a small sink. The bathroom had a scratched-up tub and a shower with a rusty head, which I would run on hot for two minutes to clear the roaches before stepping in. I slept on a twin bed and ate oatmeal and spaghetti at a plastic breakfast table on which sat a 13” black-and-white TV, my only entertainment between long hours of reading.

It was a bleak part of town. There were no signs of neighborliness, no people chatting on the sidewalk or sitting on front steps smiling at passersby. Melrose Avenue was a few blocks north—a line of second-hand shops and cheap restaurants, not the hip scene of the later TV show. My building was like six others on the block: grimy stucco on the outside and shaky walls inside that let you hear everything going on next door. The layout was simple: two stories with a long, dingy hallway lined by 20 identical units. I don’t imagine any of them were much better furnished than mine was.

I met a couple of tenants and noticed many more who gave me a nod when we passed going in or out. Some were elderly, others middle-aged. The former lived off of social security, I assumed, the latter off of jobs that didn’t pay enough to get them out of this dumpy place. They were members of the working poor (or the retired poor), a sociologist would say, living month to month above the poverty line but not by much.

One day, I witnessed a resident who served as assistant manager of the building knock on the door of an apartment whose music was filling the corridor. A 30-year-old man opened the door and glared, the manager told him to lower the volume, and the man cussed him out and slammed the door. Another time, a 20-something girl in a dirty sweatshirt and cut-offs stepped out to the street with a fellow holding a helmet. He climbed on his motorcycle, she stopped at the curb, and as he kick-started and looked back at her, she lifted her sweatshirt and brandished her bare and ample breasts as a goodbye. On another afternoon, a young man down the hall bellowed and groaned for an hour because his boyfriend had walked out for good.

One resident had a new car, a station wagon whose rear windows were dark. It was a modest hearse owned by a mortician for whom he picked up bodies from hospital morgues. On one trip when I helped out—he paid me $20 per delivery—he told me of some old folks in the building who didn’t like the sight of a hearse in front. When he left on an assignment, he would open the car door, check the building for faces at windows, and if one or two appeared, he’d tap the roof, smile, and nod his head as if to say he was ready for when their time came.

I was only 23 and didn’t know how to relate to my neighbors. Last October, however, Pope Leo issued an Apostolic Exhortation telling Catholics how they should understand and treat such people struggling at the bottom. It has the title Dilexi Te and the subheading “To all Christians on love for the poor.” The statement completes a project begun by Pope Francis that clarifies the Church’s special duty to the poor and demonstrates with Scripture and Catholic social doctrine how and why the poor hold that privileged place.

The title comes from Revelation 3:9, “I have loved you,” which is taken as expressing our obligation to help and serve the poor, as did our Savior. Commonweal called the statement “a strong dose of moral clarity at a moment of wanton greed and callousness,” a moment the editors state is exemplified by President Trump. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops aligned Dilexi Te with “the cry for racial justice” and crafted an accompanying prayer that characterizes Jesus as “the poor Messiah” who was “born in a stable, unwelcome at the inn, / raised in a family that laid no claim to land.”  

The Magnificat sets the theme in the first paragraph, with the mighty and rich brought down, the lowly and hungry lifted up. Straight off, Catholic faith and charity to the impoverished are deemed inseparable. “Love for the Lord, then, is one with love for the poor,” Leo concludes after recounting the episode of the woman anointing the head of Jesus with expensive oil. In witnessing their poverty, for which they are not responsible (see below), we are called to be better Christians. For if we do not heed their cries and miseries, Leo continues, “the poor might well cry out to the Lord against us, and we would incur guilt (cf. Deut 15:9) and turn away from the very heart of God.” 

The emphasis doesn’t let up—it intensifies. The pain the poor endure, we are told, has a pious effect: “On the wounded faces of the poor, we see the suffering of the innocent and, therefore, the suffering of Christ himself.” Indeed, the poor provide the non-poor with the most revealing access to Jesus: “In the poor, he continues to speak to us” (Leo uses the word revelation in the previous sentence). Francis says the same thing: “In the poor and the suffering, we see revealed the very heart of Christ.”

The Fathers of the Church, too, Leo states, “recognized in the poor a privileged way to reach God, a special way to meet him.” St. Augustine himself believed that “the poor are not just people to be helped, but the sacramental presence of the Lord” (this is Leo’s paraphrase, not Augustine’s words). St. John Paul adds his voice to the fact that “there is a special presence of Christ in the poor.” Leo goes so far as to assert that the poor themselves discern the truth of our Faith best: “the poor are possessed of unique insights indispensable to the church and to humanity as a whole.”

The superlatives don’t stop as the argument runs for more than 50,000 words and mentions the word poor and its derivatives 275 times. Jesus came to us as poor—a “radical poverty,” Leo says—which signifies God’s favor to these unfortunates. They stand highest in His eyes, for “the Lord’s words of hope and liberation are addressed first of all to them.” The Letter of James commands us “to supply their bodily needs”; Paul, in Jerusalem, “organized various collections” for them; while Pope Francis declared to the media three days after his election, “How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!”

Dozens more examples set the poor apart and grant them elevated status. The point of the Exhortation is to uphold a policy, the “preferential option,” which emerged out of Latin America 60 years ago and “has been well integrated into subsequent teachings of the Church.” In Dilexi Te, to advance this preference it is not enough to urge Catholics to give and support their indigent brothers and sisters. We must understand, too, that the poor are different from the non-poor—purer, more holy and innocent, more perceptive as well, with the “ability to recognize aspects of reality that others cannot see.”

They are “at the heart of the Church,” Leo says, which means that we approach that heart through them. Leo insists on this difference. It commands us to prefer them. The work of the Church, he repeats, was inspired by Jesus to take on “the mission of forming children and young people, especially the poorest, in truth and love” (emphasis mine). They are closer to God; they bear him in their visible suffering. In our prosperity, we do not.

“For Christians,” Leo states, “the poor are not a sociological category, but the very ‘flesh’ of Christ.” They are materially deprived and spiritually full. They have less money than the rest of us, but that’s only a circumstance. The real distinction of the poor is metaphysical.

In other statements this summer, Leo extended this singular description of the poor to immigrants, legal and illegal. Last June at the Canary Islands, which took in 47,000 migrants in 2024, he told a crowd of recent arrivals, “Human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border.” To organizations that helped them, he added, “I express heartfelt thanks to all who participate in rescues, in welcoming and in accompanying others.” In Tenerife he stated, “God’s love knows no borders, makes no distinctions.” Leo did not say anything about the experience of residents in small towns and neighborhoods who witness their government and NGOs settling thousands of newcomers among them.

I am not enough of a theologian to assess Leo’s distinction of the poor in this way. What I can say is that in the entire text of Dilexi Te I find nothing that resembles the characters I lived with long ago. In fact, in the 25 single-spaced pages and 130 citations of Dilexi Te, not a single individualized profile comes into focus, not one real person or place. Throughout the document, the poor are a generalization with a few blurry traits—needy, afflicted, discerning, and, above all, Christ-like. 

It’s a curious description, at once profoundly sympathetic and empirically fuzzy. The circumstances of the poor are just as general as the people themselves, labelled with cloudy abstractions such as “social and structural causes of poverty,” “new forms of poverty,” “marginalized communities,” “precarious circumstances…adverse conditions,” “unjust social ideals and political-economic systems that favor the strongest,” etc. The goal of Christian education of the poor, Leo says, is to “giv[e] them the tools to transform their reality”—whatever that means. I’ve heard this blurry idiom before in academic settings when a somber professor rises to speak of this or that injustice but not specifically enough to allow for rejoinder. “Structural causes?” you might ask, “Such as..?” only to get a reply that amounts to “Are you so uncaring that you wish to quibble over details?”

That’s the rhetorical advantage of hazy language. Here, it plays a tactical role in the exhortation, which is to discount any blame the poor shoulder for their own poverty. This is very important to Leo, who praises Gregory the Great for “denounc[ing] contemporary forms of prejudice against the poor, including the belief that they are responsible for their plight.” A more concrete rendition of the choices poor people made and the habits they formed might dampen our sympathy. Leo’s poor are radiant and vulnerable—and utterly placeless and featureless.   

The guy with the loud music was real, unkempt, and inconsiderate; and the moment he realized someone was telling him what to do in his own space, he turned into a growling beast. My small experience shows the unsurprising fact that the poor are just as morally compromised as everyone else, though differently so because of survival pressures. Leo says the well-off are blinded by their comforts, which is often true; but it is equally true that the not-well-off are blinded by their discomforts. Virtue and vice have their way at every rung of the income ladder.

Why not just say that the poor deserve extra help and leave it at that? Why this extraordinary and voluminous encomium to people in economic distress? Why draw this mystical-cognitive-moral line between them and us? Leo aims to bolster support for the poor—very good. But his persuasion is irritating. I don’t like to be coerced or manipulated into charity. Yes, I must give at every Mass, but stop pushing something that I know isn’t true.