A keynote reflection by Bishop Gerardo A. Alminaza
January 15, 2026
“I Have Loved You”: Where Faith Begins
Brothers and sisters,
Dilexi te opens with a quiet but unsettling declaration: “I have loved you.” (Rev 3:9; Dilexi Te, n. 1)
These words are spoken not to the strong or the successful, but to a community with little power and little protection. Yet they are loved. (Dilexi Te, nn. 1–2)
This is where our reflection begins.
Not with analysis.
Not with plans.
But with love.
A love that does not wait for things to improve before it speaks. A love that enters weakness, poverty, and rejection without conditions. God does not say, “I will love you when you are secure.” God says, “I have loved you,” even here, even now. (Dilexi Te, nn. 1–3)
For the Church in the Philippines, this matters deeply. These words speak into coastal villages that rebuild after every storm, into farming communities navigating flood and drought in the same year, into urban poor families living with constant uncertainty, into workers whose labor sustains the economy yet barely sustains life.
Because this love is real, it cannot remain abstract. It presses us to ask an uncomfortable but necessary question: What does it mean to be the Church of the poor when suffering has become familiar and injustice is often managed rather than confronted? (Dilexi Te, n. 15)
When Injustice Stops Shocking Us
Dilexi te names a dangerous reality. Many evils persist not because they are hidden, but because they are tolerated. (Dilexi Te, nn. 11–12)
Poverty remains widespread not because it is inevitable, but because systems allow it to persist. The poor are not poor by chance, nor by fate, nor by lack of effort. They are made poor by arrangements that benefit some while burdening others. (Dilexi Te, nn. 13–15)
In our context, this is painfully visible.
Environmental destruction continues in the name of progress, even as it weakens communities and increases disaster risk. Economic insecurity remains widespread, even during periods of growth. Governance failures persist, especially where those most affected by decisions have the least voice in making them.
What makes these realities especially dangerous is their familiarity. When the same communities are displaced again and again, when low wages and insecure work are treated as normal, when corruption and exclusion are expected rather than challenged, injustice quietly becomes part of everyday life.
The exhortation warns us that the greatest threat is not outrage but indifference. A culture that grows used to suffering. A society that moves on quickly. A faith that risks becoming comfortable with what should never be acceptable. (Dilexi Te, nn. 11–12)
The Cry That Reaches God
God tells Moses, “I have seen the misery of my people. I have heard their cries.”
(Ex 3:7–8; Dilexi Te, n. 8)
God does not hear abstractions. God hears suffering.
In the Philippines, this cry is unmistakable.
It is heard in communities recovering from typhoons, where damaged homes and lost livelihoods reveal deeper vulnerabilities. It is heard in farming areas where land degradation undermines food security. It is heard in fishing communities where environmental damage threatens survival. It is heard in urban settlements where eviction looms without meaningful consultation.
Dilexi te reminds us that poverty has many faces. Material, social, cultural, moral, and spiritual. These faces overlap and reinforce one another. (Dilexi Te, n. 9)
When land is damaged, livelihoods weaken.
When livelihoods weaken, families struggle.
When families struggle, dignity is placed at risk.
This is not a collection of separate problems. It is one wounded reality.
To encounter the poor, the exhortation insists, is to encounter Christ himself. That means encountering Christ not only in hunger and illness, but also in broken environments and fragile communities that are forced to start over again and again.
(Mt 25:40; Dilexi Te, nn. 5, 21)
Integral Ecology: From Emergency Response to Shared Responsibility
If we only respond after a disaster, we silently accept that disaster is inevitable.
Love asks harder questions.
Why are the same communities always the most exposed?
Why do recovery efforts often restore vulnerability instead of reducing it?
Why are ecological decisions so often made without the meaningful participation of those who live with their consequences?
Integral ecology teaches us that vulnerability is not only natural. It is often produced. Deforestation turns heavy rain into catastrophe. Poor land use planning turns flooding into displacement. Treating ecosystems as expendable turns climate events into humanitarian crises.
(Dilexi Te, nn. 8–10, 16)
Dilexi te does not allow us to separate compassion from responsibility. God’s love enters history not only to comfort suffering, but to liberate people from the conditions that keep suffering in place.
(Dilexi Te, nn. 16–18)
To be the Church of the poor is to refuse short memories. It is to strengthen protection before the next storm, not only to respond after it passes.
Economy: When Growth Leaves People Behind
The exhortation speaks plainly about economic systems that generate wealth while leaving many behind.
(Dilexi Te, nn. 10–13)
Growth alone is not proof of justice. Wealth can increase while inequality deepens. New forms of poverty emerge even in societies that describe themselves as successful. (Dilexi Te, n. 13)
In the Philippine setting, this tension is lived daily. Many work long hours yet remain poor. Insecure employment, contractual labor, and migration become survival strategies rather than genuine choices.
Scripture, as cited in Dilexi te, is unambiguous. Wages withheld from workers cry out to God. (Jas 5:4; Dilexi Te, n. 30)
An economy that depends on cheap labor, environmental sacrifice, and weak protection for workers contradicts love. The early Christian communities understood this. They shared goods not simply as generosity, but as justice restored. (Acts 4:32; Dilexi Te, nn. 32–34)
The Fathers of the Church went further. They insisted that what is withheld from the poor is taken from them. (Dilexi Te, nn. 42–45)
For the Church, this is not ideology. It is Gospel faithfulness.
When Silence Becomes Complicity
One of the most uncomfortable warnings in Dilexi te is directed inward.
Even believers, the exhortation reminds us, can absorb the logic of unjust systems. When poverty is explained away as personal failure, structures disappear from view. When success becomes the measure of worth, dignity becomes conditional. When faith avoids economic questions, injustice remains unchallenged. (Dilexi Te, nn. 14–15)
To be the Church of the poor is to allow the Gospel to question our assumptions, not to shield them.
Good Governance: Justice Is Not Optional
The prophets refused to separate worship from justice. Jesus identified himself with the hungry, the imprisoned, and the excluded. Dilexi te reminds us that worship detached from justice is empty. (Mt 25:31–46; Dilexi Te, nn. 28–31)
In our context, governance is experienced most concretely at the local level. When communities are consulted, protected, and respected, dignity grows. When decisions are imposed without participation, vulnerability deepens.
Corruption, lack of transparency, and political exclusion are not merely administrative failures. They are moral failures that multiply suffering.
Saint John Chrysostom’s words remain piercing: honoring Christ in worship while neglecting Christ in the poor is a contradiction. (Dilexi Te, nn. 41–42)
Silence in the face of injustice is not neutrality. It allows harm to continue.
The Church as Conscience, Not Comfort
The Church is not called to replace political institutions. But she is called to be a conscience.
Dilexi te places the Church firmly on the side of those whose dignity is threatened. This means listening seriously to workers, farmers, fisherfolk, Indigenous communities, women, youth, and the urban poor, not as beneficiaries alone, but as partners in discernment. (Dilexi Te, nn. 35–36)
The Church becomes credible when she risks discomfort, refuses indifference, and stands where Christ stands.
What It Means to Be the Church of the Poor
The exhortation states this without ambiguity: there is an inseparable bond between faith and the poor. (Dilexi Te, n. 36)
To be the Church of the poor in the Philippines is not to romanticize hardship. It is to refuse systems that repeatedly place the same communities at risk. It is to walk with those who patiently mend what has been torn, together.
Listening is not a courtesy. It is a requirement of love. Participation is not an option. It is a condition for justice.
A Church That Mends, Not Discards
A torn net is not thrown away. It is examined. It is held. It is repaired slowly, together.
Some knots remain visible. They are not signs of failure. They are signs of truth, memory, and shared responsibility.
Dilexi te calls us to this kind of faith. A faith that refuses shortcuts. A faith that does not discard what has suffered. A faith that strengthens what still holds. (Dilexi Te, nn. 31, 48)
Beyond Repair: Why Love Demands Systemic Change
Love that remains at the level of individual compassion is not enough.
Dilexi Te makes this unmistakably clear when it insists that the cry of the poor is not only a personal appeal, but a historical challenge addressed to societies, political systems, and economic structures (Dilexi Te). Poverty persists not because of fate, but because social arrangements repeatedly produce it, protect it, and normalize it (Dilexi Te).
If love truly takes the side of the poor, then love must also confront the systems that keep the poor poor.
The exhortation reminds us that God does not merely hear the cry of the oppressed. God comes down to liberate them (Ex 3:7–10; Dilexi Te). This descent of God into history is not symbolic. It is disruptive. It breaks the logic of domination and exposes arrangements that benefit the powerful at the expense of the weak (Dilexi Te).
In this light, charity alone is insufficient. What is required is transformation, and transformation is never an individual project. It is always collective.
Why Individual Goodness Is Not Enough
The poor do not suffer in isolation. They suffer as workers inside exploitative labor systems, as farmers inside unequal land relations, as fisherfolk inside extractive economies, as communities exposed to climate risk they did not create (Dilexi Te).
Dilexi Te explicitly warns against explanations that reduce poverty to personal failure or moral weakness. Such explanations, it says, are forms of blindness that hide the structural roots of injustice (Dilexi Te). When poverty is individualized, responsibility is removed from systems and placed on those who suffer under them.
The Gospel does not permit this distortion.
Scripture speaks of wages withheld, land accumulated unjustly, and wealth hoarded while others starve (Jas 5:4; Lk 16:19–31; Dilexi Te). These are not isolated moral lapses. They are descriptions of systemic sin, where economic arrangements themselves become instruments of injustice.
To follow Christ, therefore, is not only to be kind within unjust systems, but to question and resist systems that depend on inequality to function (Dilexi Te).
The Poor as a Collective Subject of History
One of the most radical affirmations of Dilexi Te is that the poor are not merely recipients of care. They are bearers of dignity, truth, and agency (Dilexi Te).
The exhortation recalls that God consistently chooses the lowly not only to receive liberation, but to participate in it. From the enslaved [people of God] to the early Christian communities that shared goods in common (Ex 3:10; Acts 4:32; Dilexi Te), liberation unfolds through people acting together.
This means that the struggle for justice cannot be delegated upward. It is born from below.
Workers organizing for just wages, farmers defending land, [indigenous] communities resisting destructive projects, and neighborhoods demanding accountability are not acting outside the Gospel. They are embodying its social logic (Dilexi Te).
Faith becomes credible when it accompanies these collective efforts, not as an external sponsor, but as a companion walking the same road (Dilexi Te).
Integral Ecology Requires Structural Conversion
The climate crisis reveals with painful clarity that injustice is systemic.
Those who profit most from environmental destruction are often insulated from its consequences, while the poor absorb the damage. Flooding, drought, displacement, and food insecurity fall disproportionately on communities with the least political power (Dilexi Te).
Dilexi Te insists that concern for the poor cannot be separated from concern for the structures that expose them to harm (Dilexi Te). Ecological devastation is not accidental. It is tied to models of production that prioritize profit over life.
Responding only through relief after disaster accepts this logic as inevitable. Love demands more. It demands collective action aimed at changing land use, energy systems, and economic priorities so that vulnerability is reduced before the next crisis arrives (Dilexi Te).
The Church as a Collective Moral Force
The Church, Dilexi Te reminds us, is not called to replace political institutions, but neither is she permitted to remain neutral (Dilexi Te). Neutrality in situations of structural injustice favors the status quo.
To be the Church of the poor is to stand with communities as they organize, discern, and struggle for life. It is to defend participation, transparency, and accountability. It is to insist that governance exists to serve the common good, not private accumulation.
This does not mean turning the Church into a political party. It means allowing the Gospel to shape how power, wealth, and decision-making are judged.
Love That Organizes
“I have loved you,” the Lord says.
This love does not stop at compassion. It moves toward transformation.
Love becomes credible when it organizes itself into communities of resistance and hope, when it strengthens collective action, and when it refuses to accept injustice as normal.
The Church of the poor is not built only through generosity. It is built through shared struggle, sustained solidarity, and the patient work of changing systems that wound life.
This is the love Dilexi Te calls us to live:
a love that descends into history,
a love that walks with the poor,
and a love that dares to change the world together.
Conclusion: Love That Refuses Tolerated Evils
“I have loved you.”
(Rev 3:9; Dilexi Te, n. 1)
This love does not explain away suffering.
It does not spiritualize inequality.
It does not tolerate broken systems as normal.
We are called not only to mend what has been torn, but to confront why it keeps tearing. To strengthen what still holds before the next storm comes. To choose prevention alongside response, justice alongside charity, and participation alongside policy.
May we become a Church in the Philippines that refuses tolerated evils.
A Church that hears the cry as one cry.
A Church that walks with the poor, patiently mending what has been broken, together.