HERE’S something that I haven’t seen mentioned in all the articles about why Pope Leo XIV chose his papal name. It may tell us more about the new Pope than the mixed signals that he has sent out to date by coming out onto the balcony dressed like Pope Benedict, but speaking like a more measured version of Pope Francis.
The new Pope’s nominal predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, was the first pontiff who had to cope with the idea that his rule was purely spiritual. The papal states were a temporal power until the new Italian national army breached the walls of Rome in 1870. Italy was unified. But, at the same time, Communism was stirring across a newly industrialised Europe.
It was in this context that Leo XIII wrote his celebrated encyclical, Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), in 1891. The document, pundits have pointed out, was a defence of workers’ rights and trades unions. But there was more to it than that.
Thirty years earlier, at the height of the industrial revolution — when capitalism was unfettered and working people were increasingly exploited — Karl Marx had established an organisation to unite socialist, anarchist, and workers groups across Europe. Communism was turning from a theory into a movement.
In response, a German bishop, Wilhelm von Ketteler, wrote The Worker Question and Christianity, which looked back to medieval Christendom, where different classes had specific roles but were unified in a common moral and religious order. His tone was more sympathetic to Socialist ideals than to free market ideology. In the UK, Cardinal Manning had become a champion of workers’ rights, siding with labourers seeking fair wages in the 1889 London dock strike. In Italy, the Italian Socialist Party was formally constituted in the same year that Rerum Novarum was published.
The Church, Leo XIII believed, could become a bulwark against Communism’s atheistic materialism — but only if it could offer an alternative.
Rerum Novarum condemned the excesses of capitalism in vivid language. “Covetous and grasping men” had “been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself” (RerumNovarum, §3). Such was the vigour of its language that it was condemned at the time as a Socialist document.
Yet it took pains to be critical of Socialism, which it described as “working on the poor man’s envy of the rich”. It rejected the idea of abolishing private property and placing ownership in the hands of the State or community (§6). Importantly, it stated that, where the free market fails, the State has a duty to interfere on behalf of the poor (§36). It launched a tradition of Catholic social teaching, which, for more than 100 years, has explored the development of a more ethical capitalism, with human dignity at its base.
Today, we face not an industrial revolution but a digital one. Generative AI brings blessings, but also the shadow of more misinformation, threats to intellectual property, and increases in unemployment. It risks turning human relations into mere algorithms, Pope Francis warned, calling for an international treaty to regulate it. It is, Pope Leo says, a challenge to both human dignity and social justice. But Catholic social teaching, he is telling us, can offer a solution.