Remembering Leo XIII

When Robert Francis Prevost chose Leo XIV for his papal name, he was making a statement about the future direction of his pontificate by invoking the legacy of Pope Leo XIII. To better understand our current pope and how he envisions the specific challenges and opportunities facing the Church, it is worth looking back at the papacy of Pope Leo XIII.

Pope Leo XIII’s pontificate confronted a world in turmoil. At the start of his pontificate in 1878, the Industrial Revolution in the Western world had led to a growing chasm of inequality between rich and poor, with rampant child labor, poor pay, long hours, horrific working conditions, and little safety net for the most vulnerable. These conditions fueled growing skepticism toward capitalism, aristocracy, traditional government, and the Church itself, with new ideologies such as Socialism and Anarchism sharply critiquing existing power structures. Against this backdrop, Leo issued a series of encyclicals–open letters to the Church–that became known as the Church’s Social Teachings. In the most influential of these encyclicals, Rerum Novarum(1891), Leo addressed “the relative rights and the mutual duties of the wealthy and the poor,” affirming the right to private property for both owners and workers, the right to fair wages, the formation of labor organizations, and the need to ameliorate the working conditions of women and children. It was Rerum Novarum that Leo XIV cited as key in choosing the name of his predecessor.

In addition to his encyclicals, Leo XIII was enormously influential in reviving the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Having been trained in Thomistic philosophy alongside his Jesuit brother, a Thomist scholar, Leo saw “The Angelic Doctor” as a thinker capable of helping the church navigate the complex relationship between faith and reason especially in light of modern challenges to belief such as scientific discovery, historical criticism, and modern philosophical trends. Leo’s endorsement led to the launch of what is now known as the Leonine Edition of the complete works of Thomas Aquinas. Though reclaiming the thought of a thirteenth-century theologian may appear to be a retreat from modernity, it could also be seen as a renewed engagement–one that accepts Reason in its place, while affording the Faith of the Church a privileged purview in matters of the soul.

Leo XIII’s engagement with modernity extended beyond his social encyclicals. By the late nineteenth century, the Church–with its history of scientific suppression (e.g. of Galileo)--was perceived as being in direct conflict with science, whose findings in the areas of human origins challenged traditional biblical worldviews. Leo sought to move beyond the simple binary of faith versus science and established the Vatican Astronomical Observatory in 1891, stating that “the Church and her Pastors are not opposed to true and solid science, whether human or divine, but that they embrace it, encourage it, and promote it with the fullest possible dedication.” Leo’s cautious embrace of scientific inquiry was mirrored by his support of modern historical approaches to Scripture. In issuing the encyclical Providentissimus Deus in 1891, and instituting the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1902, Leo emphasized both the inspired and inerrant character of the Bible and the mediating role of Church tradition, while encouraging the use of new scholarly methods.

Leo sought to chart a course for the Church that was neither a wholesale rejection nor acceptance of modernity, but rather a path of careful discernment rooted in tradition and open to new possibilities.

Curated by Adrian Vaagenes