The Catholic Church now has its first American pope, but Robert Francis Prevost’s papal name of Leo XIV is perhaps far more significant than his national origins.
The name gives a heavy hint about how the new pontiff might address our contemporary economic and social ills. The use of Leo points back to the reforming 19th-century Pope Leo XIII who, like Prevost, was faced with steering the Church through a world in ideological flux.
That the new pope has chosen to emphasise the legacy of Leo XII suggests he is aware of the revolutionary nature of the current economic age
Leo XIII was pontiff from 1878 to 1903. He is best known for his great 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which tackled the challenges of capital and labour at a time of rapid industrial change and revolutionary politics. There are parallels with our own age, as unchecked AI barons transform the world and political extremes fester.
Rerum Novarum provided the foundation for what is known as Catholic Social Teaching, which contains the Church’s tenets on modern economic and social systems. This navigates a pragmatic course through the ideas of left and right toward the common good, via the key concept of subsidiarity which supports decision-making at the local and individual level and opposes centralisation where possible. The Church rejects the misguided view of human nature expressed in both totalitarian left-wing ideologies and unfettered free market capitalism.
On the one hand, Leo XIII’s encyclical condemned socialism, confirmed the rights of private property and supported trade unions. On the other, it attacked ‘the greed of unchecked competition’ and complained that ‘a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.’
That the new pope has chosen to emphasise this legacy suggests he is aware of the revolutionary nature of the current economic age. This is the context in which his comments, currently being pored over by the world’s media, should be viewed.
His reference to confronting the domination of ‘technology, money, success [and] power’ in a sermon during his first mass as pope in the Sistine Chapel should not be surprising. Nor should his retweet more than a decade ago of a cartoon in which Pope Francis tells three figures characterised as Wall Street, banks, and big business to avoid being ‘seduced by money’. Nor should his recent disagreement with US vice president J.D. Vance’s take on how Christian love properly relates to US immigration policy.
Of course, the Church has much more than material conditions in mind. Leo XIII: ‘if human society is to be healed now, in no other way can it be healed save by a return to Christian life’. Leo XIV: Christ has been ‘reduced only to a kind of charismatic leader or superman’, and Christians now risk living in ‘de facto atheism’.
Misunderstandings about the Catholic approach to economics and markets have led to some absurd comments after Prevost was confirmed as the new pope. Sometime Trump advisor Laura Loomer announced that a ‘WOKE MARXIST POPE’ had been raised to the throne of St Peter.
Such pronouncements were unfortunately common during the Francis pontificate. There was much erroneous analysis of the late pope’s comments on social issues, but also of his teachings on economics and modern markets. Francis was cast in some quarters as some sort of left-wing Vatican infiltrator when he made statements like the environment being ‘defenceless before the interests of a deified market’.
It was somehow ignored that Benedict XVI, dubbed as an arch-traditionalist by the liberal media, was spoken of as ‘the Green Pope’. Then there is the continuity with the teaching of John Paul II, that great Polish opponent of communism, when he got to the heart of the matter 100 years after Rerum Novarum in his encyclical Centesimus Annus.
That encyclical spoke positively of the central role of business, the market and private property in modern economics as well as the connected freedom of human creativity in the economic sphere. But it confirmed that what we know as modern capitalism must be ‘circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious.’
The fact is that the early comments of Leo XIV highlight consistency with his immediate predecessors rather than discord and are squarely in the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching.
With his choice of name, Pope Leo XIV connects the upheavals of 19th-century society with our own challenges. As the new pope’s words on economic-related questions – from the environment and AI to stark wealth disparities and unions – emerge in the months and years ahead, the wider context and long history of the Church’s teaching should be kept in mind.
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