By choosing the name Leo XIV, Cardinal Robert Prevost, elected pope on Thursday, May 8, aligns himself with a distinguished predecessor. Matteo Bruni, head of the Vatican press office, confirmed that the decision to be called Leo XIV was a clear and deliberate reference to Pope Leo XIII, just hours after the new pope's identity was revealed from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica.
A member of the Augustinians, a mendicant order, the successor to Francis thus signals he sees himself in the pope who laid the foundations of the Church's social doctrine, a matter particularly dear to both Prevost and Pope Francis – who had chosen his name in homage of Saint Francis of Assisi, who dedicated his life to the poor. Leo XIII wrote the encyclical Rerum Novarum ("Of New Things"), an important text in contemporary Catholicism. In this document from 1981, the Italian, whose pontificate was one of the longest in history, from 1878 to 1903, brought labor and social questions into the Church's doctrine. Leo XIII condemned the misery and poverty of workers, criticized the excesses of capitalism, called for fairer compensation for workers and even encouraged the formation of trade unions.
While refuting the socialist ideas gaining ground in Europe at the time, the pontiff's text lamented that the "hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself." These themes particularly resonate in the modern era for a new pope who spent the majority of his ecclesiastical career in Peru, a country beset by many social crises. During his 30 years in the country, he encountered Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of liberation theology, who died in 2024. Gutierrez had argued that the poor must free themselves through action, even revolt if necessary.
Inclusion and aid to the poorest and those in distress should therefore be, as it was with Francis, one of the major axes of the next pontificate. For American Jesuit David McCallum, based in Rome, the choice of this name in a modern world undergoing social, political and economic transformations is more relevant than ever. "Aligning with Leo XIII remains pertinent today, as it prioritizes human dignity and the common good," said the cleric.
Leo XIII also maintained a particularly close relationship with the Augustinian order, "which only reinforces the connection between the two men," said Roberto Regoli, a Church historian at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.