The article discusses the category of the option for the poor, by answering four key questions: 1) What is the option for the poor?; 2) Who are the poor?; 3) Why the option for the poor?; 4) How to opt? The category of the option for the poor emerged in Latin America at the turn of the 60s and 70s of the twentieth century, as the fruit of an audit of faith and the personal, communitarian, social and ecclesial life . The author defines the category according to the teaching of the bishops (Medellin and Puebla), to John Paul II and Latin-American theologians . He highlights the need for clarifying the meaning of poverty and the poor, specifically of the current theological understanding of these concepts . He then describes main theological reasons of the option for the poor: God’s plan of salvation; the theology of creation; human dignity; the mystery of sin; the phenomenon of poverty as a place of proving the fundamental statements about God and Jesus Christ; an ecclesiological significance of the option for the poor. In the last part of the paper the author quotes the Polish translation of the so-called The Pact of St. Domitilla Catacombs, which illustrates one of more promising ways of implementing that option in both personal and ecclesial life.

The aim of the article is to show the inculturation of faith and the popular religiosity as the context in which Pope Francis’ Marian spirituality and Mariology have been shaped. Inculturation of faith began in South America with Mary’s apparition in Guadalupe in 1531, however, the theological reflection on the importance of evangelization of culture and popular piety developed in South America only after the Second Vatican Council. The milestones in its development are two Conferences of CELAM: in Puebla in 1979 and in Aparecida in 2007. Moreover, the emergence of Argentinean theology of the people in the 1970s played also an important role in its development. Pope Francis, in his programmatic apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium emphasized Mary’s place in popular piety and her role in preaching the Gospel.