Dilexi Te & Christian Confusion About Poverty

Pope Leo XIV’s first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te, arrived with much fanfare and not a little interpretive anxiety. Its English title, “I Have Loved You,” evokes divine charity, but its economic implications have stirred predictable debate. The exhortation affirms that the poor are not poor because they deserve it, and that meritocracy often disguises indifference. That is a necessary correction to the cult of self-help. Yet Dilexi Te also exposes an enduring Catholic tension about how poverty is best alleviated. It praises solidarity but treats enterprise as something that must be tolerated rather than celebrated. That tension matters because history has already run the experiment. Free markets, private property, and human ingenuity have lifted more people out of poverty than any government program or global charity.

In 1990 roughly 2.5 billion people lived in extreme poverty. By 2020 that number had fallen below 800 million — even as the global population increased by nearly two billion. The World Bank attributes most of this change to economic growth rather than to redistribution of wealth. A one percent rise in per-capita income typically produces a three percent fall in poverty rates. Welfare programs can soften blows, but they do not create wealth. The great engine of poverty reduction is enterprise. The irony is that most Catholics concerned for the poor speak as though markets were a necessary evil instead of the poor’s most effective ally.

Economist Thomas Sowell often reminds his readers that markets are systems of cooperation rather than competition. Prices convey information that no bureaucracy could ever gather, and incentives reward productivity without coercion. Welfare programs, however noble, can reverse that process. When the state subsidizes dependency, the cycle of creation and responsibility breaks down. Men made in God’s image are meant to act as co-creators, not as clients of an ever-expanding state. Sowell calls this the fallacy of “cosmic justice,” the notion that inequalities can be engineered away by redistributing outcomes instead of expanding opportunity. The result is stagnation disguised as compassion.

Catholic social teaching, when read carefully, does not contradict this. Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) defends the right to private property and warns against socialism. Pope St. John Paul II in Centesimus Annus (1991) goes further, declaring that “the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs.” He recognizes that freedom without moral order degenerates into exploitation, but he insists that economic liberty within a just, legal framework is not only legitimate but essential to human dignity. Pope Benedict XVI in Caritas in Veritate (2009) repeats the warning against greed yet affirms that markets, when governed by truth and charity, serve the common good. None of these popes thought the solution to poverty was a welfare state. Each recognized that subsidiarity — the principle that higher authorities should not usurp what individuals or smaller communities can do — applies as much to economics as to politics.