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Yesterday, Pope Leo issued his first substantial text. Addressing the theme of poverty, it’s a sequel to Pope Francis’s text exploring the role of the human heart and Jesus’s sacred heart in our common life. The heart, for Francis, evokes the idea of our affections, closeness, encounter, proximity. The heart’s language is intimacy. By contrast, heartlessness and distance often go hand in hand. Yet, Francis believed, it is the cooler language of rational self-interest, efficiency and the bottom line that dominates, and at a cost. It privatises our affections. Leo’s new text now applies this social vision of a heart that is capable of proximity to what he calls ‘the needs of the poor’. Much anticipated, the most striking thing about Leo’s letter is that it says absolutely nothing new. Any pundit rapidly thumbing its pages for novelty will be disappointed. Instead, it reads as a quiet, steady testament to a basic, unchanging, unending Christian responsibility to be at the side of and on the side of the most marginalised – margins that come in different forms. The message is, ideologies come and go, but the basic Christian responsibility remains the same. He repeats all the uncomfortable, life-giving teachings of Christianity, including: The awkward truth that Christ reveals himself to the most despised and marginalised; that the goods of creation are meant for the benefit of all, that Christians are called to be advocates for the poorest knowing that one day they will become our advocates, that the only real power that Christian faith has is to recognise the good and cooperate with it, co-create with it; there is no real distance between the rich and the poor, our welfare is bound together, we merely create the cold fiction that it is not; that responsibility for the person lying in a doorway is personal and structural; that death, the ultimate poverty, is a reality we all share; that Christ dwells in all this poverty and overcomes it. It strikes me that it is precisely in its lack of novelty that this letter is most urgent and counter-cultural. It speaks ancient truths in the face of new ideologies and the ever-inventive history of poverty. In the face of rising inequalities and growing techno feudalisms that reassert old hierarchies in new forms, and as the fashion to revile empathy and proximity as risible weaknesses grows, Leo gives the counter witness, as heart speaks to heart.