ROME – In a meeting with the College of Cardinals Saturday, two days after his election to the papacy, Pope Leo XIV explained that he chose his papal name as a commitment to the Church’s social teaching amid a new revolution in artificial intelligence.
The Pope said there were various reasons for why he chose his papal name “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”.
Rerum Novarum ("New Things") is an encyclical written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 addressing the conditions of the working classes and which deals with various social issues. It is widely hailed as having laid out the framework for the Catholic Church’s modern social doctrine and its position on social issues, which were a bedrock of Pope Francis’s pontificate.
