When the new pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church was named on May 8, 2026, one of the first things to be decided was what his new name would be. At the beginning of their reign, each pope gives up his old birth name and takes on a new title, usually signalling something important about their intentions for their papacy. In this case, Robert Prevost, a member of the Augustinian order who was serving as a cardinal (or prince) of the church, became Pope Leo XIV.
It had been more than a century since a pope had chosen the name of Leo, and the immediate nominal predecessor of the new pope is significant. Indeed, Pope Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 until his death in 1903, is heralded a return to the authoritative teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, in his encyclical Aeterni Patris in 1879 and is credited with inaugurating modern Catholic Social Teaching with his encyclical letter Rerum Novarum in 1891. Indeed, Thomas is quoted explicitly 6 times in Rerum Novarum, far more than any other source excluding the Bible. In this way Thomas Aquinas is significant not only for the modern renewal of Roman Catholic theology and doctrine, but especially for the church’s moral and social thought.
Leo XIV may not be as directly focused on Thomas Aquinas as his predecessor, but he is emphatic about the importance of bringing the church’s teaching to bear on contemporary challenges in society. Just two days after being named pope, Leo XIV addressed the College of Cardinals and said that he chose his name “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 defence of human dignity, justice and labour.”
Revolution, Then and Now
The monumental encyclical Rerum Novarum took on the dangers and exaggerations of revolutionary worldviews, embedded in theories including Marxism and materialism as well as in phenomena including industrial progress and economic development. For Leo XIII, these revolutionary movements were built around erroneous understandings of the world, including God and the human person. Mistakes in conceptions of human beings inevitably lead to mistakes in politics, economics, and society. And these errors can have devastating consequences. Rather than class conflict, Leo XIII proclaims human solidarity and complementarity. “But, if Christian precepts prevail,” he writes, “the respective classes will not only be united in the bonds of friendship, but also in those of brotherly love.” Each class and indeed, each individual person, has something unique to contribute to the common good.
In the context of the upheaval of these revolutionary movements in the nineteenth century, Leo XIII powerfully argued that it was of the utmost importance to recover and redeploy the unchanging insights of the Christian tradition about God, humanity, and society. “If human society is to be healed now,” says Leo XIII, “in no other way can it be healed save by a return to Christian life and Christian institutions.” In our day Leo XIV is pursuing a similar course, attempting to articulate the reliable and authentic teaching of the church in a new, challenging and turbulent context. While his predecessor faced socialist collectivism, utilitarian individualism, and mass upheaval, Leo XIV sees a world often bereft of hope and dominated by social media, biotechnology, advanced military weapons, and terrorism.
Technology is a particular concern of Leo XIV, as the advent of artificial intelligence and digital platforms portends significant political, economic, and social disruption. In an address to a Vatican conference on AI, ethics, and corporate governance in June, Pope Leo XIV observed that “the rapid development of AI also raises deeper questions concerning the proper use of such technology in generating a more authentically just and human global society.” Leo explicitly noted that the development and deployment of AI technology must be pursued in light of a normative vision of the “integral development of the human person and society,” invoking a foundational principle of Catholic Social Teaching.
An Integral Anthropology
Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch Reformed contemporary of Leo XIII, identified Roman Catholicism as a distinct and significant tradition, a world- and lifeview consisting of an integrated understanding of the human being in relation to God, neighbor, and the created order. For Kuyper, the Roman Catholic worldview teaches “that God enters into fellowship with the creature by means of a mystic middle-link, which is the Church;—not taken as a mystic organism, but as a visible, palpable and tangible institution.” The institutional church, including the magisterium, the hierarchy, and the papal office, occupies a place of central importance in the self-understanding and in the social teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.
But this distinctive worldview also comes to expression in a particular vision of the human person, in our nature and essence as well as in our relationships. As Leo XIV has articulated it, integral development involves a comprehensive conception of the human person as an individual and in relation to the broader social order and its proper organization. In this way, integral development “entails taking into account the well-being of the human person not only materially, but also intellectually and spiritually; it means safeguarding the inviolable dignity of each human person and respecting the cultural and spiritual riches and diversity of the world’s peoples.”
As Leo concludes, “Ultimately, the benefits or risks of AI must be evaluated precisely according to this superior ethical criterion.” And while the current pope has a special challenge in addressing the quickly changing landscape of artificial intelligence, technological development, and economic change, he has the advantage of self-consciously drawing on more than a century of Catholic Social Teaching, first begun by his nominal predecessor, Leo XIII. Much has changed between 1891 and 2025, but the normative Christian vision of the human person has not, and the new pope is committed to promoting and protecting human dignity in an ever changing world.
