The New Pope and His New Name

Rerum Novarum and How We Work with Leo XIV

Photo: Diocese of Knoxville, TN

On May 8^th around 12pm Central Time, the world got a new Pope: Bishop Robert Francis Prevost, OSA an Augustinian born in Chicago.

American Pope.

Chicago Pope.

And not only that, but Bishop Prevost is also a graduate of Catholic Theological Union, the school of theology and ministry where I worked full-time in marketing for two years, and with whom I still work regularly as a client and through my Fellowship with their Bernardin Center.

Two years ago, I wrote a press release for CTU about Bishop Prevost when Pope Francis chose him to head up the Dicastery for Bishops. (You can read it HERE if you’d like). And now he’s the Pope.

The Dicastery for Bishops is responsible for overseeing the selection and appointment of Bishops. For two years, our new Pope oversaw the office that manages the very people who elected him. One could certainly raise an eyebrow at what that suggests a la stacking the court. A more compassionate interpretation might be that it says a lot when you and your coworkers come together to promote your hiring manager.

But this isn’t the only way that our new Pope is already reflecting something important about work, management, and our present age of capital.

Prevost took the name Leo XIV.

Pope Leo the XIII, our last Leo, is most known for writing the encyclical Rerum Novarum. Translated into English? On Capital and Labor.

An alternate subtitle to Rerum Novarum might be, “And On Communism and Socialism.” This encyclical was the first response of any global official, anywhere, to the rise of socialist and communist powers around the world. It was written in 1891. Far before the rise of Nazi Germany, the USSR, or Communist China.

This encyclical is best known as the letter that started the Catholic Church’s social teaching, which is why it was a core part of my education at St. Mary’s College of California. Or at least, they tried to have it be…

Rerum Novarum was included in the reading list for the third year of Great Books Seminar, a class that all students had to take. But the conversation we had in class about the encyclical didn’t go very well, and I think the reason why speaks to the current political moment, the conversation surrounding the papal conclave before Prevost’s election, and what the Catholic Church, particularly in the United States, most needs.

Rerum Novarum is about labor.

It’s about the rights of all people to dignified work and the God-given empowerment of private ownership. Rerum Novarum is about “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses” and “the conditions of the working classes.” Rerum Novarum is about solidarity and economic inequality, about the deep chasm that runs between the working class and the wealthy. Rerum Novarum is about exactly that which our world, far beyond the United States, so desperately needs: Unity in the protection of the working class, and aggressive counteraction against those who hoard wealth.

Working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition… The hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.

Even more, Rerum Novarum makes clear that it is the job of every single government not only to support its people, but to give special attention to the poor through public works and services.

It may be truly said that it is only by the labor of working men that States grow rich. Justice, therefore, demands that the interests of the working classes should be carefully watched over by the administration, so that they who contribute so largely to the advantage of the community may themselves share in the benefits which they create-that being housed, clothed, and bodily fit, they may find their life less hard and more endurable… Still, when there is question of defending the rights of individuals, the poor and badly off have a claim to special consideration. The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves, and stand less in need of help from the State; whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon, and must chiefly depend upon the assistance of the State.

Though, the document is careful to distinguish between these provisions and the total “paternalism” of systems like socialism.

As such, Rerum Novarum is also about defending personal property and individual rights to individual wealth. It’s about limiting governmental overstepping and distinguishing between rightly-ordered associations of people and unjust ones. There is much of Rerum Novarum that I disagree with, particularly the equating of private property to other human rights like marriage. This analogy is created, according to Leo XIII, implicitly by the Ten Commandments. Honoring one’s spouse and coveting another’s suggests that these “ownerships” are intended by God. Again, it was written in 1891.

We didn’t talk about any of this in Seminar class. A small cohort of Women’s and Gender Studies majors – who I wasn’t friends with then, and whom I occasionally exchange lovely DMs with now – sitting in the corner of the room wanted to talk about the sexism of the Catholic Church. Appropriate, given the critical lens they were being trained into in their other courses! I totally get it! The Catholic Church is undeniably, egregiously sexist, and needs to be called out as such. Hello, equating the right to a wife with the right to private property…

And still, our line of discourse that day in class was completely cleaved from the text, which itself violated a required part of our class participation: That we root our comments in the text. On a technicality, my classmates zeroed in on the word “patriarchs” as it appears at the outset of the letter… Because it’s the address, a Catholic “To whom it may concern…” The patriarchs are the Bishops to whom the Pope is writing – because they are responsible for holding their geographic regions responsible to the ethics of the Church which he outlines in the letter – but the letter is at its core for everyone, because it is about the working class, which the Bishops are not.

I can remember saying all of this very firmly in class, but it did not help. “They are literally spelling it out before they even begin: This letter is for men only. They’re upholding patriarchy in everything they do,” carried on my classmates. I don’t think we talked about labor once the entire hour.

I remember being extremely irritated with our Professor for not redirecting the conversation. Every teacher had their own pedagogical strategy when it came to Seminar; his was to be entirely hands-off. But he was also the Chair of the Theology and Religious Studies Department. Didn’t he have a responsibility to center us on the content of the letter itself, especially given how important (And progressive! And nuanced!) the message was?

The discussion was a failure for two reasons: The content we ignored and how our ignorance worked against the content. We are living this dual failure every single day in our modern society.

First of all, there’s the heart of the letter, which I implore you to read, Catholic or not. Rerum Novarum outlines a consistent ethic of labor, one that showcases the good that labor is for the human body, mind, spirit, and society. James Baldwin may have said “I do not dream of labor,” but labor is not itself evil. Working with our hands, growing and creating things – living, mechanical, artistic – and being able to exchange the work of our hands for goods, services, and currency that allow us to live dignified lives is a part of intrinsic human dignity. For all those worried about how “no one wants to work anymore,” Rerum Novarum speaks to the urgency of that perceived crisis.

But Rerum Novarum also diagnoses exactly why no one wants to work anymore: The imbalance of capital, the exploitation of the masses, all of which saps the dignity out of labor entirely.

Rerum Novarum says there’s no room in a humane Christian society for billionaires and generative technologies that place the aesthetic and intellectual goods of life into the hands of robots. Rerum Novarum says that pay transparency, work/life balance, and unions all make a capitalistic society better because they uphold the equality of all human beings.

We could’ve talked about this in class – we could be talking about it now! – but instead, our silos and echo chambers and social media and buzzwords have situated us to make assumptions based off political party affiliations that not only don’t align with theological belief systems one-to-one, but that keep us dulled and ignorant. So says Rerum Novarum,

The first thing of all to secure is to save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making. It is neither just nor human so to grind men down… as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies.

We are being taught how not to critically think and being bombarded with the immediacy of economic instability. Out of desperation and dopamine addiction, we bypass our cognitive reasoning and jump straight into the hearts of our emotions.

“An encyclical villainizing Communism? Sounds like Far-Right propaganda!”

The world has a new Pope.

Now is our chance to wipe a few slates clean and try something new in these perilous times. In many ways, Bishop Prevost is the perfect choice for the Catholic Church of today and tomorrow, both within and outside the United States.

The American Catholic Church is on the brink of schism. It needs a Pope that can speak to the liturgical and social concerns of the most Conservative while protecting the dignity and diversity of the most Progressive who feel excluded based on issues of identity and culture.

Our new Pope Leo XIV is an Augustinian, an order that has always prided itself on the robust theological traditions of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, two favorites among more conservative Catholics, who together provide much of the moral and aesthetic backbone of the modern church. Augustinians are academic and charitable, perhaps we might just say thoughtful.

As Robert Prevost, the new Pope studied at Catholic Theological Union, which situates itself in the overlap between these US factions as well. Cooperatively owned and managed by a corporation of 20+ men’s religious orders, CTU must bear the difficult task of balancing competing desires between diverse charisms, each of which has different opinions about the future of the church and theological education. Some orders think the solution to the lack of students pursuing graduate degrees is to simply find more priests and vowed religious, often from other countries. Other orders think the solution is to invest more fervently in the formation of young people and the laity who, as more and more religious die out and fewer young people take religious vows, will ultimately carry on the traditions of the Church. These competing futurities often fall along conservative and progressive lines. As such, CTU has become a place where theological formation must wrestle with both, and students must dialogue with each other across their many identities and aisles. This is the formation our new Pope has received.

This is also an overlap his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, occupied well. It is no surprise, really, that this is the name he chose. Rerum Novarum even speaks to the exact way capitalistic exploitation, this obsession with competitive wealth-driven industry, deprives the working class from imagining hopeful futures, thereby corroding all sense of right and wrong.

In addition to authoring Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII was a rigorous supporter of both the rosary and scapular as significant sacramentals and cultural practices for the global church. Nowadays, these religious practices may be seen as more traditional. The last Leo did not make theological compromises. We can assume our new Leo is committed to the same.

Sure, there are other things that can be assumed about Pope Leo XIV.

For one thing, there’s his social media presence, which is sure to be wiped soon, so get your screenshots while you can! Most recently, as Bishop Prevost, Pope Leo reposted an essay by Kat Armas for NCR denouncing Vice President JD Vance for misleading the public on the topic of Ordo Amoris. Prevost has also made his support of racial justice, gun reform, and other more “progressive” topics clear.

One concern voiced by many upon the announcement of an American Pope is that the United States already wields enormous global power. Wouldn’t an American Pope skew that concentration of power even more?

Maybe, if the United States weren’t falling into complete and total fascist chaos.

Right now, no one is looking to the United States for global leadership. In fact, I suspect one reason there was such enormous global, and secular, interest in the conclave was that, right now, people around the world but especially in the United States are scared and craving competent, consistent leadership. The Pope could provide just that.

In one sense, this new Pope has the chance to be a new American leader, one we in the United States can look to for consolation and guidance amid our nation’s destruction. An American Pope understands America’s needs and concerns and can hold Donald Trump and his cronies accountable.

But ultimately, our new Pope has spent more time outside the United States that in it. This is also a good thing, because the Catholic Church is growing almost everywhere except the United States. Pope Leo XIV speaks five languages and has dual citizenship in Peru. His Urbi et Orbi blessing, done partly in Spanish, set an amazing precedent for the increasingly Spanish-speaking Catholic world.

All these tidbits of information can help us draw conclusions that provide feelings of control in this intense time of transition. But at the end of the day, they’re just that: Conclusions drawn in the early hours after a world-changing announcement. In the same hours following his own introduction, Pope Francis was called a “theological traditionalist,” and we know how that turned out. We will have to wait and see what Pope Leo XIV does.

But we must do our part, too. And our part is to actually read the things, and then to actually talk about the content. We must engage with integrity, even if we suspect we disagree.

Since Kamala Harris’ defeat in October, much ink has been spilled over the reasons for her loss, with significant blame cast on the Progressive obsession with perfection over goodness. For many on the Left, complete and total alignment across intersecting issues - an impossible achievement - has become the only acceptable goal, and it’s this very same “policing” of opinions that has marginalized the moderate and right-wing Americans who, when presented with other terms of engagement, might otherwise be willing to find a bit of the common ground we so desperately need in order to combat techno-fascism.

Going forward, we are going to have to link arms with people whom we disagree with. If there’s anything I hope the global secular audience who watched the conclave can learn at this moment, it’s that the Catholic Church has something to offer about global ethics, policy, and solidarity.

There are certain things that cannot be overlooked – the basic, inalienable dignity of each and every human person regardless of religion, identity, or country of origin – but there are policies, technologies, approaches, and even basic principles and ideas that can be thoroughly debated without holding us back from constructive work.

In his opening address, Pope Leo XIV called for dialogue over division. To achieve this, we must rebuild our tolerance for conflict, staying in the room instead of quitting when we get uncomfortable. We also must read the source material: We need journalists of many kinds, we need scientific and medical professionals with various opinions, we need authors and artists of many talents. We need experts, and we have to actually read them. No asking ChatGPT to summarize and write our thoughts for us. No grasping onto single buzzwords and allowing them to inform our whole opinions. No stopping at “the Patriarchs” and refusing to go any further.

I am, to my own surprise, excited for what this next chapter of the Catholic Church’s story could contain. All week, I’ve been unspeakably nervous. Now, with the livestreams turned off and my Instagram feed slowing down, I’m feeling something I haven’t in a long time, certainly not since Trump’s election.

No, it’s not just hope. It’s relief. The kind of relief you feel when you’re sick at school and your parent finally comes to get you.

We have someone to look to, after these two weeks of vacancy. And it’s someone who I trust will engage with fairness and consistency, even if I don’t always agree. There’s something huge to be said for that.