Letter 25
To my brother in the faith,
The obligation of Christians to care for the poor is one of the clearest teachings in the New Testament and one of the most consistently ignored in practice. I want to say something direct about it.
The poor are not a problem to be managed. They are, as Christ himself said, his presence in the world — "whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me." A Christian who treats the poor as an inconvenience or a social problem rather than as a direct encounter with Christ has not understood the gospel.
In practice, this means that care for the poor must be built into the structure of Christian life, not treated as an optional addition for the particularly pious. The church's alms — the portion of its revenues dedicated to the poor — are not a discretionary budget; they are an obligation. A bishop who reduces charitable distributions to fund other things, however worthy, is making a decision that requires careful justification.
It also means that the way we treat the poor in our daily lives matters. The deference we show to the powerful and the dismissiveness we sometimes show to the poor is a reversal of the gospel's priorities. This is a constant temptation and a constant failure, and the remedy is the constant reminder of what we actually believe.
I include myself in this correction.
Desiderius
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.