St. John Christem is saying this is effectively what we're doing to Christ because we are decking out the churches beautifully,

but we're not caring for the poor. He considers it essential to insist on this path to holiness.

Now, I like that framing. He's not just saying we should care for the poor out of social justice or economic equality or something like that,

but because we actually want to

strive for holiness. Welcome back to Seamus Popery. I'm Joe Heschmard, and I want to share with you some of the things that struck me about Pope Leo's new apicelic exportation, Deluxeite. Now, I want to see a couple things at the outset. First, a little bit about what the document is, second, a little bit about what this is going to be. The first thing to know is that Delexite is an apostolic exhortation. In other words,

it's not laying out church doctrine per se, the way a papal encyclical does. Rather, it's taking

things we already know or should know and exhorting us, encouraging us.

And so that's the nature of what an apostolic exportation is.

So sometimes people have read this document and said, we don't know this stuff.

Like, come on.

But it's like, yeah, but go do it.

Like, that's kind of the nature of it.

A lot of this is stuff that we know or should know already.

I found there were a lot of points where I'd never heard a particular quote before, or there was a way of phrasing things that I

thought was really striking or really challenging in a good way. But it's not going to be something

where you say, oh, I didn't realize I was supposed to care for the poor as a Christian, hopefully.

Hopefully a lot of this feels familiar.

But it is nevertheless a good thing to be challenged about.

Second, it is sort of a companion document.

And Pope Leo makes very clear that he's taking a draft that was already worked on by Pope Francis

and then adding his own kind of

commentary on it.

...