Will Leo XIV Be the Labor Pope?

There has been an explosion of media coverage of what the new pope may mean for global Catholicism. But there was little reporting about the meaning of his papal name, until he explained it to cardinals on May 10. Like his predecessors, Pope Leo XIV has reasons for his papal name. The late Pope Francis, for example, was honoring the widely venerated Saint Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan order. Leo addressed the question of the legacy of Francis and the future direction of the church, saying, “Let us take up this precious legacy and continue on the journey.”  

But he did not name himself Francis II. His journey will be down a road less traveled. The new pope chose to follow from his 19th century predecessor, Leo XIII. 

As Vatican News reports, the Pope, a native of Chicago and naturalized citizen of Peru, explained that he selected his papal name in part to commemorate Pope Leo XIII’s commitment to social issues and workers’ rights during the industrial revolution, as epitomized in his signature papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, issued in May 1891. He told the assembled cardinals he took the name Leo XIV “mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.” 

“Modern Catholic social justice economics begins with Rerum Novarum (Of New Things),” wrote the late American Catholic writer Frank Cocozzelli in 2008, who emphasized the encyclical’s subtitle, “The Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor.”  

In it, Cocozzelli wrote:  

Leo severely condemned unrestrained libertarian capitalism, while maintaining the church’s opposition to communism and support of private property ownership. Key progressive components included a living wage—the minimum salary necessary for workers to support their family—and the right of labor to organize unions. 

Cocozzelli added that Rerum Novarum led, in 1919, to the “next major step in Roman Catholic social justice teaching in the United States”—The Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction issued by the National Catholic Welfare Council. The program’s author, Monsignor John A. Ryan later wrote that the program “was issued in response to the general need which men felt after the war [World War I] for programs for the reconstruction of social regions.”  

“It called for the right of workers to organize for the purpose of collective bargaining and for retirement insurance,” Cocozzelli wrote, and “it embraced government programs as the means for achieving these goals.”   

The bishops’ call for retirement insurance was a forerunner of what in 1935 was to become Social Security. Indeed, the bishop’s program served as a blueprint for much New Deal legislation. According to Cocozzelli, Ryan “became a confidant of FDR, earning the moniker, ‘the Right Reverend New Dealer.’ ”  

But that was then.   

Now Leo XIV intends to bring Rerum Novarum into the 21st century. “In our own day,” he said on May 10, “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 defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”  

At a time when the Trump administration and the Republican Party seem determined to diminish, if not dismantle the signature achievements of the New Deal—from Social Security to the National Labor Relations Board—people are looking to established institutions to serve as countervailing forces. 

This is especially true for those in rural America and migrant farm workers across the country. 

Immediately after his election as Pope, several observers dug up some of Prevost’s past social media posts criticizing Trump’s view on immigration, including a post of a 2015 op-ed in The Washington Post by Cardinal Timothy Dolan titled “Why Donald Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Is So Problematic.” In February, Prevost also posted an article in support of Pope Francis’s letter to American Catholic Bishops that denounced Trump’s mass deportation agenda. That letter also took issue with Vice President J.D. Vance’s interpretation of St. Augustine’s concept of ordo amoris, meaning the order of love, which Vance has used to justify deportations of migrants in the U.S. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted,” Francis wrote, “is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love the builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” 

Of course, whether Leo XIV will become “the labor pope,” remains to be seen. But in his address to the cardinals, he was unambiguous: He intends to update and reinvigorate the social justice teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. 

Frederick ClarksonMore by this author →

Frederick Clarkson is a Senior Research Analyst at Political Research Associates in Somerville, Massachusetts. He has written about politics and religion for four decades and is the author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy and editor of Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America.