When Cardinal Robert Prevost took the name Leo XIV, the world understood that he was signalling his desire to become the heir of one of the most extraordinary Popes of the modern era.
Pope Leo XIII combined an astute metaphysical awareness with a determination to confront the raw power of political and economic development with the conscience of the Church, in order to defend those at the bottom of the political and economic heap who were being discarded by a particular economic revolution.
Leo XIV has now produced the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which immediately sets the present crisis before us in the form of competing anthropologies and competing eschatologies.
