A week after Pope Francis released his first papal exhortation, the innocuously named “Joy of the Gospel,” it is still causing ruptures. Rush Limbaugh dismissed it as “pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope.” At least one Roman Catholic group demanded that Limbaugh apologize and retract his remarks, but that seems unlikely. And meanwhile, some conservative economic commentators, while stopping short of echoing Limbaugh’s words, have accused the Pope of misrepresenting global capitalism, and ignoring its role in wealth creation.

It’s the not the first time that the seventy-six-year-old Argentine has created controversy since he took over the papacy in March. But on this occasion, what is he actually saying? Rather than relying on secondhand accounts, it’s worth examining his own words, which run to two hundred and twenty-three pages.

A papal exhortation is an official statement issued by the Vatican that ranks below formal encyclicals, which are used to state the Church’s position on things like abortion and contraception, but above a regular letter to the faithful. In this instance, Pope Francis, who succeeded the arch-conservative Pope Benedict XVI, is laying down some themes for his tenure, and he ranges well beyond economics. He writes primarily about the meaning of the Gospels, the challenges facing Roman Catholicism—including a section on “Temptations faced by pastoral workers”—and the need for a renewed missionary impulse in the Church. “The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus,” he begins. “I wish to encourage the Christian faithful to embark upon a new chapter of evangelization marked by this joy, while pointing out new paths for the Church’s journey in years to come.”

If this sounds more like the language of a prelate than a political economist, nobody should be surprised. Like many Jesuits, the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a doctrinal traditionalist, who puts great stress on the language of the New Testament. But he also has a vision of the Church as an institution that acts for, and on behalf of, the dispossessed—a vision that owes a lot to Saint Francis of Assisi, the thirteenth-century Italian who renounced his inheritance to tend to the poor. In Buenos Aires, Bergoglio’s latest biographer, Paul Vallely, reminds us in his new book about the Pope, he was known as “Bishop of the Slums.” On taking Francis’s name and entering the Vatican, he said he wanted “a poor Church, and for the poor.”

Of course, the poor have long been with us, and Catholic priests and lay workers the world over have long made great exertions on their behalf. All too often, though, this charitable work has coexisted with a Church hierarchy that studiously avoided critiquing the political and economic system that generates poverty and inequality. And when such a critique did emerge from within the Church, during the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies, in the form of “liberation theology”—a doctrine that placed helping the poor and oppressed front and center—the Vatican stamped down on it, with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who eventually became Pope Benedict XVI, playing a prominent role. Pope Francis seems intent on revisiting this debate. In the part of the exhortation devoted to economic matters, which runs to about twenty pages, he resurrects, and appears to endorse, many of the themes of liberation theology. He begins:

It is not the task of the Pope to offer a detailed and complete analysis of contemporary reality, but I do exhort all the communities to an “ever watchful scrutiny of the signs of the times.” This is in fact a grave responsibility, since certain present realities, unless effectively dealt with, are capable of setting off processes of dehumanization which would then be hard to reverse. We need to distinguish clearly what might be a fruit of the kingdom from what runs counter to God’s plan.

“Dehumanization” is a strong word. Francis doesn’t flinch from its meaning. He goes on: