When Pope Leo XIV addressed the College of Cardinals two days after he was elected to the papacy, he explained why he took the name that he did.
“Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV,” he said. “There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great Industrial Revolution. In our own day, 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.”
Pope Leo XIII was born Joachim Vincent Pecci in 1810 in Carpineto, Italy, the second-youngest of seven children.
“The inhabitants of Carpineto were generally…
