Immediately after a man is elected pope, he answers two questions in the conclave: “Do you accept election? By what name will you be called?” 

The rest of us have a third: “Why that name?” 

The answer is not always initially clear. Pope Benedict XVI might have chosen his name to honor the sixth-century abbot Benedict of Nursia, who helped evangelize Europe, or Pope Benedict XV, who sought peace during World War I. The answer was both. When Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio stunned everyone with the name Francis, we assumed the first Jesuit pope was thinking of one of the first Jesuits, Francis Xavier. Wrong. When he explained he felt the world needed peace and the poor needed a protector, it became clear he had Francis of Assisi in mind. 

As an Augustinian friar, Leo XIV could have been the first Pope Augustine, as Francis might have been the first Ignatius. Perhaps that choice would have been seen as presumptuous. Of the several dozen popes from religious orders, not one took the name of his community’s inspiration. Once Cardinal Bergoglio pushed the envelope with the alter Christus über-saint Francis, anything became possible.

Although Cardinal Robert Prevost could have had in mind the fifth-century Leo the Great, or Leo IX, who got medieval church reform rolling, Leo XIII seemed the most likely candidate. Speaking to the college of cardinals two days after his election, the new pope confirmed this connection.

There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic encyclical “Rerum Novarum” addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.

He has not yet identified the other reasons. Someone needs to ask that question.

Leo XIII

Gioacchino Pecci was born in 1810 into a lower aristocratic tier south of Rome. Ordained in 1837, he spent the first part of his ministry as an administrator in the Papal States, then still in place. Made a bishop at 33, he was an undistinguished diplomat in Belgium before taking a long-term position as bishop of Perugia in 1846. Pope Pius IX named him a cardinal at 43. In 1878, he was elected pope in a quick conclave, perhaps because at 68 he seemed a safe choice for a short, uneventful papacy after the increasingly cantankerous later part of Pius IX’s long reign of nearly 32 years. 

It did not turn out that way. Leo XIII ended up one of the two oldest popes in history, dying at 93. He shares the record with Celestine III, the oldest man ever elected—at 85 in 1191. Leo XIII also had the third-longest papacy, at not quite 25 and a half years. The longest was his predecessor’s (though legend has St. Peter serving 35 years). Pius IX did not quite make it to a full 32 years, but he was pope longer than St. John Paul II’s 26 and a half years. Taken together, the 57-year span of Pius IX and Leo XIII (1846-1903) is the longest period with the fewest papacies. For context, in that same time frame the United States had 16 presidencies. 

When one views the record of his papacy in authoritative works like J. N.D. Kelly’s Oxford Dictionary of the Popes and Eamon Duffy’s Saints and Sinners, Leo XIII’s papacy sits as a vigorous contrast between the intransigent Pius IX before him and his staid successor, Pope Pius X. Leo XIII made a cardinal of John Henry Newman, the champion of the development of doctrine who was persona non grata to Pius IX, and he opened the Vatican’s archives. He invigorated Scripture study with “Providentissimus Deus” in 1893, which made it easier for Catholic scholars to embrace newer methodologies and collaborate with Protestant colleagues. He also supported the reading of vernacular Bibles by laypeople in approved translations.

Alas, a few years after Leo XIII’s death, the Pontifical Biblical Commission he had established began retrenching on matters scriptural. It declared, for example, that all Catholics must believe Moses was the author of the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch), though few Scripture scholars even then agreed. 

Leo XIII had also overhauled the curriculum of his diocesan seminary in Perugia and promoted the study of Thomism there. Then, as pope, he released the 1879 encyclical “Aeterni Patris,” which raised Thomism to the highest dais of theological study. Over time, however, neo-Thomism, also known as neo-scholasticism, succumbed to a tendency to make doctrinal study more rigid than it was questioning, which belied medieval scholasticism’s spirit and method. 

With “Testem Benevolentiae,” Leo XIII condemned the strawman heresy of Americanism, which supposedly advocated for a capitulating accommodation with modern culture. That condemnation has an ironic ring now that a successor from Chicago is sitting in his chair.

Leo XIII’s most well-known encyclical, “Rerum Novarum,” might make us think he was a champion of the people. To a degree, he was. Known by the now worn-out nickname of Magna Carta of the church’s social justice tradition, “Rerum Novarum” certainly put the church behind workers alienated from the value of their efforts. But it condemned socialism, not capitalism. The pope wrote:

[I]t is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property. 

On the other hand, the encyclical also recognized the rights of workers to unionize and seek fair wages and safe working conditions that in turn ensured a healthy family life. This fact has sometimes struck church employees with lousy salaries and medical benefits as hollow, especially when bishops and Catholic institutions or business owners oppose their efforts to unionize.

Leo XIII was also a bit of a monarchist. There is the unverifiable anecdote that in a quarter of a century, he never spoke to his carriage driver. He was the first pope ever filmed, in 1896, and part of the two-minute clip has him riding in that carriage. He seems delightfully bemused by the camera as he leans on a cane and repeatedly makes a languid approximation of the sign of the cross. 

He was a fan of Pope Innocent III (1198-1216), the last true papal monarch, and moved Innocent III’s body from Perugia to Rome’s Lateran Basilica. The church historian Owen Chadwick described Leo XIII’s grandiose manner as “cool if not cold.” Eamon Duffy is harsher: “There is a numbing smugness about the insistence in many of his encyclicals that the Church is responsible for all that is good in human society, human culture. It is the voice of a man who has worn a cassock and lived among clerics all his life.”

Leo XIII also knew a pope had to play nice sometimes. His concern was the common good, and he recognized democratic governments could deliver on that goal. He seems to have had a begrudging approval of some religious toleration and free speech. In a diplomatic success, he helped blunt the worst excesses of the Kulturkampf in central Europe in the 1880s, making it easier for German Catholics to exercise their faith. As an emerging world leader, he created church hierarchies in Japan and India while making almost 30 dioceses in the United States.

He also sought to build bridges with the Christian East, unlike prior popes, including Pius IX, whose position was essentially that Orthodox patriarchs should recognize their mistake and come home to Rome. Leo XIII praised the diversity of liturgical rites and spoke respectfully of Eastern practices. This is a stance worth watching as Leo XIV figures out how to handle traditionalists who wish to celebrate the Tridentine Rite or at least Mass in Latin. 

Leo XIV

It would be a mistake at this very early stage of a new papacy to try to measure Leo XIII’s influence by the number of times Leo XIV directly includes him in a footnote. That is a task for a dissertation years from now, but even then sometimes numbers are just numbers. Better to look for spirit, not citation, and here we are likely to find more Augustine than Leo XIII. In his first major document, “Dilexi Te,” Leo XIV mentions “Rerum Novarum” and Leo XIII only once in passing (No. 83). 

This might come across as less surprising, of course, if one considers that “Rerum Novarum” is like one of the documents of the Second Vatican Council at this point: It is the air that the church breathes. It’s there all the time, though we cannot see it. It is more remarkable that a man like Leo XIII wrote that encyclical then than that Leo XIV embraces it now. 

What strikes the eye, on the other hand, is the degree to which popes after Leo XIII have been fighting the causes of income inequality rather than just calling the church to care for those cast aside in reaction. Some conveniently forget that John Paul II was as much a critic of capitalism as he was of communism. And recall Pope Francis’ stark command in “Evangelii Gaudium” that we must reject “an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills” (No. 53), adding, “the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root” (No. 59).

True, Leo XIV echoes Leo XIII in recounting the workers’ needs, but Leo XIV is tougher on capitalism than his namesake. In “Dilexi Te,” he states the following:

[I]n a world where the poor are increasingly numerous, we paradoxically see the growth of a wealthy elite, living in a bubble of comfort and luxury, almost in another world compared to ordinary people. This means that a culture still persists—sometimes well disguised—that discards others without even realizing it and tolerates with indifference that millions of people die of hunger or survive in conditions unfit for human beings (No. 11). 

Later in the same document, he attacks the ”structures of sin that create poverty and extreme inequality” (Nos. 90-98).

Leo XIV also laid out some of the ways he would build on Leo XIII in his address to the world meeting of popular movements in late October of 2025, where he praised his predecessor for drawing attention to the industrial revolution’s impact on workers. “Today, however, exclusion is the new face of social injustice. The gap between a ‘small minority’—1 percent of the population—and the overwhelming majority has widened dramatically.” Leo XIV notes fewer unions and declining institutional and governmental support, turning here to his Augustinian training: “But ‘a state without justice is not a state,’ as Saint Augustine reminds us [City of God, XIX, 211]. Justice requires that the institutions of each state be at the service of every social class and of all residents, harmonizing the diverse interests and demands.”

One last initial observation about a papacy just getting started: the startling jump Leo XIV made to the topic of artificial intelligence when explaining his name choice. Of course, A.I. did not exist in the late 19th century, so it seems Leo XIV was, like Leo XIII, looking to the emerging technological challenges of his day. He told a gathering in October, on the 60th anniversary of Vatican II’s document on education:

The decisive point is not technology, but the use we make of it. Artificial intelligence and digital environments must be oriented towards the protection of dignity, justice and work; they must be governed according to criteria of public ethics and participation; they must be accompanied by adequate theological and philosophical reflection.

Just a month after his election, Pope Leo XIV sent a message to the second annual conference on A.I., ethics and corporate governance, telling them to remember the human impact, especially on young people, and the dangers of the blurred line between generated A.I. images and statements and reality. Things like goodness, truth and beauty do not come from machines, he seemed to say, but from human creativity and compassion. 

Leo XIV is reminding us to continually distinguish between data and wisdom. In a world starved of empathy, Leo XIII’s call for us to care for each other might be the most important item on Leo XIV’s agenda.

Christopher M. Bellitto is professor of history at Kean University. His books include 101 Questions and Answers on Popes and the Papacy and, most recently, Humility: The Secret History of a Lost Virtue and Walking Toward Virtue: A Journey With Dante.