Why Did Pope Leo XIV Choose His Name?
The AI connection, explained with primary sources.
Pope Leo XIV chose his name because of artificial intelligence. He said so explicitly, in his own words, in his first formal address to the College of Cardinals on May 10, 2025, two days after his election.
The name was a deliberate choice, made to draw a direct line between two historical moments: Pope Leo XIII's response to the Industrial Revolution in 1891, and Leo XIV's intended response to the AI revolution in the 2020s. He told the Cardinals the Church now offers 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."
This page explains what that means: who Leo XIII was, what Rerum Novarum actually said, and why the parallel matters for anyone trying to understand the Pope's AI agenda. It draws on primary Vatican sources throughout.
Leo XIV's exact words
The pivotal sentence comes near the end of Leo XIV's first address to the cardinals, gathered in the New Synod Hall at the Vatican on May 10, 2025. Speaking in Italian, the newly elected pope explained the reasoning directly.
Pope Leo XIV told the cardinals he chose the 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." He then drew the parallel forward: the Church, he said, now offers 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."
No symbolism. No interpretation needed. The first American pope and a former mathematician chose his name to signal that AI would be the defining issue of his papacy, and that the Church would meet it the same way it met the steam engine: with a social teaching aimed at protecting human dignity.
Sources: Full address text: OSV News. Summary: Vatican News.
Who was Pope Leo XIII?
Leo XIII was pope from 1878 to 1903, twenty-five years that overlapped almost exactly with the height of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the Americas. By the late 1880s, factories had transformed agrarian Europe into something unrecognizable. People had moved by the millions from villages to urban industrial centers. Working conditions in those centers were often dangerous, hours were long, wages were low, and there were essentially no legal protections for workers.
Two ideologies were competing to explain the situation. Unrestrained capitalism, the dominant practice, argued the market would eventually correct itself. Socialism, rising fast, argued for the abolition of private property and a workers' revolution. The Church had largely been silent.
Leo XIII broke that silence. In 1891 he issued Rerum Novarum (Latin for "Of New Things"), the first encyclical of what is now called modern Catholic social teaching. It is the document Leo XIV is invoking.
What did Rerum Novarum actually say?
Rerum Novarum did three things that mattered enormously, both in 1891 and today.
First, it named the problem. Leo XIII described workers facing conditions "little better than slavery." He didn't soften it. He didn't blame the workers. He named the industrial system as producing genuine moral injustice.
Second, it rejected both extremes. Leo XIII refused to endorse socialism (he defended the right to private property) but he also refused to endorse laissez-faire capitalism. He argued for a third way: a regulated economy in which workers had rights, governments had responsibilities, and the dignity of the human person, not the efficiency of the market, was the measure of a just society.
Third, it laid the groundwork. Rerum Novarum affirmed the right to fair wages, the right of workers to form unions, the limits of working hours, the special obligation to protect women and children, and the principle that the economy exists for the human person, not the human person for the economy. These principles became the foundation of every subsequent papal encyclical on economic life and arguably influenced the labor movement worldwide.
Primary source: Rerum Novarum, full text (vatican.va, 1891).
Why the parallel matters for AI
Leo XIV's invocation of Rerum Novarum is not nostalgia. It is a precise structural argument. The claim, embedded in the choice of name, has four parts.
1. AI is a new industrial revolution.
Not a tool, not a product, not an app. A structural transformation of how work happens, what humans are for in the economy, and how power and wealth flow. The same scale of disruption as 1891, in a different form.
2. The disruption is moral, not just economic.
Just as the steam engine raised questions far beyond efficiency (about dignity, family, community, justice), AI raises questions far beyond productivity. About what humans are. What thinking is. What relationships are for. What truth is. These are theological questions, not technical ones.
3. The Church has a contribution to make.
Catholic social teaching is a 130-year tradition of analyzing exactly this kind of moral-economic disruption. It has vocabulary, principles, and judgments that the AI conversation is currently lacking. Leo XIV is signaling that he intends to bring that tradition to bear.
4. The center of the response will be human dignity.
Just as Rerum Novarum refused to evaluate the Industrial Revolution by economic productivity alone, Leo XIV's papacy will refuse to evaluate AI by capability alone. The question is not what AI can do, but what it does to us.
What comes next
The choice of name was not the end of the argument. It was the opening. In the year since, Pope Leo XIV has returned to AI repeatedly, in addresses to legislators, young people, AI conference attendees, priests, and the global Catholic media. He signed his first encyclical, focused on artificial intelligence, on May 15, 2026, with the full text expected by the end of May.
When that encyclical drops, it will be the formal extension of the argument Leo XIV started with his name. Rerum Novarum set the precedent: when a technology changes everything, the Church speaks.