1 - The title
Dilexi Te means: ‘I have loved you’ and is a title taken from the Book of Revelation Rev 3:9)
2 - The date
The document was signed on 4 October, the feast of St Francis of Assisi
3 - Pope Francis
Pope Francis himself had begun work on the apostolic exhortation in the months before his death. As with Benedict XVI's Lumen Fidei, collected in 2013 by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, this time too it is his successor who will complete the work that represents a continuation of Dilexit Nos, the Argentine Pope's last encyclical on the Heart of Jesus
4 - St Francis
St Francis of Assisi is the main source of inspiration
5 - The Poor
The Apostolic Exhortation underlines how strong is the ‘nexus’ between love of God and love for the poor. And it recalls the theme of the ‘preferential option’ for the poor, an expression created not to indicate ‘an exclusivism or discrimination towards other groups’, but rather ‘God's action’ that moves to compassion for the weakness of humanity
6 - A church poor and for the poor
The desire for ‘a church that is poor and for the poor’ is recovered
7 - Culture of waste, freedom of the market, pastoral care of elites
It is recalled that there still persists - ‘sometimes well disguised’ - a culture of discarding that ‘tolerates with indifference that millions of people die of hunger or survive in conditions unworthy of human beings’. What the Pope calls for is a ‘transformation of mentality’.
8 - Work
Access to dignified work and the means of social transformation is defended
9 - Charity
Over the centuries, saints, blessed, missionaries have embodied the image of ‘a poor Church for the poor’ (35). From Francis of Assisi and his gesture of embracing a leper (7) to Mother Teresa, a universal icon of charity dedicated to the dying of India ‘with a tenderness that was prayer’.
10 - Women
Our thoughts go out to all those women who are ‘doubly poor’, who live in ‘situations of exclusion, abuse and violence, because they often find themselves with fewer opportunities to defend their rights’.
