“Dilexi Te”: What Pope Leo XIV’s New Exhortation Means for Campus Ministry
by Rosie Chinea Shawver
A New Exhortation, A Renewed Call
Pope Leo XIV’s new Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi Te (October 9, 2025) - Latin for “I Have Loved You” - calls the Church to rediscover the heart of Christian life: love for the poor.
For those of us in Catholic campus ministry, this message feels especially timely. Our students are navigating an age marked by inequality, anxiety, and disconnection, yet they’re also seeking authenticity, meaning, and mission. Dilexi Te is an invitation to ground our campus ministries once again in the Gospel’s preferential love for the marginalized, to form students who not only believe, but live mercy and justice.
Key Themes for Campus Ministers
While the document is written for the whole Church, it speaks directly to the realities we face on our campuses:
1. Faith and love for the poor cannot be separated
Pope Leo reminds us that faith without concrete love is incomplete. Christian maturity requires recognizing Christ’s presence in the poor, not as an afterthought to evangelization, but as its center.
2. The poor are not objects of ministry but partners in discipleship
Dilexi Te invites us to listen to the poor as teachers. Their witness, resilience, and faith reveal the face of Christ in ways that academic life often forgets
3. The Church must become a community for the poor
Campus ministry isn’t just about helping the marginalized; it’s about shaping a community that reflects God’s own preference for them, in our priorities, budgets, and presence on campus.
4. Justice is love made structural
The exhortation challenges us to go beyond service projects toward a deeper engagement with systems that perpetuate inequality. Advocacy, education, and institutional reform are all acts of love. While Dilexi Te urges concrete acts of charity, it doesn’t leave justice to the state alone. Pope Leo XIV reminds us that both belong to Christian life: charity is personal love in action, and justice is that love made social. One without the other is incomplete.
5. Conversion happens through encounter
The Holy Father reminds us that we are transformed when we meet Christ in those who suffer. Our ministries become schools of holiness when they facilitate those encounters.
What This Looks Like on Campus
Reimagining “the poor” on campus
Poverty on campus is not always financial, it can look like loneliness, food insecurity or the struggle of first-generation students trying to belong. Dilexi Te urges us to see these faces with the eyes of Christ.
Try this: host listening sessions with students who feel unseen or unsupported. Let their stories shape the direction of your ministry.
Forming students in the “preferential option for the poor”
Use Dilexi Te in your formation programs. Pair Scripture and Catholic Social Teaching with local immersion experiences. Invite students to reflect on what authentic solidarity looks like in their majors, career paths, and friendships.
Building bridges, not silos
Collaborate across campus: with service-learning departments and local nonprofits. True solidarity happens when we step outside our usual ministry circles and work for the common good together.
Modeling simplicity and care
Invite students (and yourself) into rhythms of simplicity - shared meals, small acts of service, prayer with the poor, Sabbath rest. Formation happens as much by how we live as by what we teach.
A Call to CCMA Members
Dilexi Te is more than a beautiful text - it’s a roadmap for renewal in campus ministry. It challenges us to examine our own ministries:
Do our programs reflect a genuine love for the poor?
Do our students encounter Christ through relationships, not just charity?
Are we forming leaders who understand justice as an expression of love?
If we take this exhortation seriously, our campuses will become places where the Gospel is not only proclaimed, but embodied.
Next Steps for You and Your Team
To help campus ministers put Dilexi Te into practice, CCMA is hosting an upcoming Office Hours session focused on Service & Justice - a space to explore creative strategies, share best practices, and discern next steps together. Sign up here!
We also invite you to engage CCMA’s new Service & Justice Innovation Hub - a national initiative designed to help campus ministers reinvigorate their service and justice efforts through collaboration, grants, and shared learning. Contact Emily (klaus@ccmanetwork.org) for more info!
Both are practical ways to move from reading Dilexi Te to living it - together.
Final Reflection
As Pope Leo XIV writes, “The measure of our love for Christ is the measure of our closeness to the poor.”
On our campuses, that love takes shape in mentoring a student who feels invisible, accompanying those burdened by debt or loneliness, or challenging systems that keep people on the margins.
May Dilexi Te renew our hearts, ministries, and communities -and remind us that the road to holiness often begins in the simplest, most human acts of love.