The Two Leos 

Pope Leo XIV has explained that his choice of regnal name is an homage to Pope Leo XIII (1878–1903), the architect of the modern papacy. It was Leo who confronted the industrial and political revolutions with gospel principles, launching modern Catholic social teaching. It was Leo who moved the Church away from a defensive posture against the ills of modernity toward, as George Weigel puts it, engagement with modernity in order to convert it. My own view is that the two great popes of the modern papacy are its founder, Leo XIII, and its exemplar, St. John Paul the Great. The two are remarkably similar, elected to the throne of Peter exactly a century apart.

I was thus most pleased with Leo XIV’s invocation of Leo XIII. The new Holy Father made particular reference to Leo XIII reigning in a time of economic and social change; Leo XIV intuits that something similar is afoot, in another “industrial” revolution, this one driven by digital technology and, as the Holy Father has specifically mentioned, artificial intelligence.

The vastness of Leo XIII’s magisterium—dozens and dozens of encyclicals over twenty-five years—is such that nearly everything can be found there. On Wednesday, granting a Jubilee Year audience to the Eastern Catholic Churches, Leo XIV recalled that in 1894, Leo XIII was the “first Pope to devote a specific document to the dignity of your Churches, inspired above all by the fact that, in his words, ‘the work of human redemption began in the East.’” He was the first pope to do a great many things.

Leo XIII’s charter of social teaching, Rerum Novarum, was published 134 years ago today, on May 15, 1891. When John Paul issued his centennial encyclical, Centesimus Annus, in 1991, he dated it May 1 instead—as much public satisfaction as he would allow himself after the tearing down of the Iron Curtain, dancing on the grave of Soviet communism on May Day.

Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., has recently written in these pages about Rerum Novarum, pointing out that Leo’s vision was that society was made up of many societies, each with its own proper identity and mission. The three necessary societies are the family, the state, and the Church. There are other societies too, particularly in the sphere of economics.

All these societies are actors in their own right; one could speak of the sociability of society; society is sociable, societies flourish together. John Paul spoke of these societies as “subjects,” not “objects,” and therefore was fond of the phrase “the subjectivity of society.” Society was composed of a multitude of acting subjects. To be a subject rather than an object means to be the source of action, to be free.

Rerum Novarum needs to be read together with Leo’s 1888 encyclical Libertas on human liberty. “Liberty, the highest of natural endowments, being the portion only of intellectual or rational natures, confers on man this dignity—that he is ‘in the hand of his counsel’ (Sirach 15:14) and has power over his actions,” wrote Leo in that earlier encyclical. 

Leo XIII was no libertarian; much of Libertas details the proper limits of liberty. Even those most prized liberties of conscience, speech, and the press are ordered by Leo to the truth and the common good; there is no liberty without a proper end, or liberty solely for its own sake. Nevertheless, Leo’s emphasis on the goodness of liberty was fresh in 1888 and set forth what might be called the “liberty” path in Catholic social teaching. 

It is possible to speak of two paths the magisterium has taken on economic questions since Leo. There is the liberty path, in which the plight of workers is to be relieved by expanding the scope of their economic liberty, their agency and creativity. It is rooted in a view that man’s greatest creative resource is himself, and that the desire of a country for “the greatest possible measure of prosperity” is acceptable, within the bounds of justice.

The poor, in Leo’s vision, have the creative and productive capacity to escape poverty; it is the obligation of the political and economic system to foster this. John Paul, a century later, is firmly within the liberty-creativity-productivity path. 

The alternative path was sketched out first by Pope Pius XI and was largely followed by St. Paul VI and Pope Francis. It tended not to focus on the potential to move from poverty to prosperity, but on inequality and exploitation as a cause of it. The “equality” path by its nature tends toward state action and redistributive policies, rather than economic liberty and growth. 

Both the liberty path and the equality path are part of Catholic social teaching. Within each path are numerous options in economic policymaking. Where Pope Leo XIV will fit remains of course to be seen.

Fr. White notes that “it is a serious historical error” to separate the Leo of the scholastic revival from the Leo of social doctrine. “For Leo, the revival of scholasticism in the modern world was about the deep harmony of divine revelation and natural reason (both philosophical and scientific), but it was also about political empowerment,” White writes. “By giving people true knowledge of the principles of human dignity and by showing how these principles relate to other disciplines like the natural sciences, one fosters a greater personal autonomy for everyone, and a greater access to economic viability.”

A knowledge of truth that fosters personal autonomy and economic viability is a good summary of the priority on liberty found in Leo XIII’s thought. There is reason to think that Leo XIV’s own Augustinian background in the Christian anthropology of the Church Fathers, as well as his exposure in Peru to the limits of the state, politically and economically, might dispose him to the liberty path, recalling that liberty is the greatest of natural endowments.