Gioacchino Vincenzo Pecci was hardly a conventional liberal. He might more accurately be described as an Ultramontane with a liberal face.

What should we read into the fact that after being elected pope, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost chose the name Leo XIV? Commentators have eagerly fixed on Leo XIII’s celebrated 1891 encyclical decrying the evils of untrammelled capitalism, Rerum Novarum, as a signal that Leo XIV will share Pope Francis’ protectiveness towards the poor and distaste for neo-liberal economics. Speaking to the college of cardinals last Saturday, Leo said there were different reasons for his choice of name, but it was mainly because Leo XIII had addressed social questions in the context of the first great industrial revolution. “In our own day,” he told them, “the Church offers to everyone the treasury of 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.”

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