The choice of a new name is an opportunity for newly elected popes to hint at their agenda for the Catholic Church. In 2005, Joseph Ratzinger chose the name Benedict XVI to reflect his conviction that European civilization was at risk of forgetting its roots in the great Benedictine monasteries of the Early Middle Ages. In 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose the name Francis to evoke St Francis’s famous closeness to the poor. By choosing a name no pope before him had used, he suggested a willingness to break with Church traditions in other ways.

Shortly after his election as Leo XIV, Robert Prevost explained his choice of name as a tribute to his predecessor Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903), specifically referencing Rerum novarum, the1891 encyclical that marked the Church’s first major engagement with labor issues in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. While Leo wasn’t the first Catholic thinker to consider political economy, he was the first pope to place economic and labor concerns at the center of his papacy — earning him the title “father of Catholic social teaching.”

Rerum novarum was the Catholic Church’s first major effort to reckon with a world transformed by new industrial technologies, the proletarianization of the masses, and the emerging ideologies of socialism and nationalism. By invoking this legacy, Leo XIV signals his intention to offer a Catholic 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.”