Pope Francis’ alternative of his official identify in 2013 ruffled just a few feathers. That he was the primary pope to undertake it was not the one cause. In 1210, Pope Harmless III (1198-1216), that shrewdest of operators, determined to advertise, somewhat than suppress, the mendicant order lately based by Francis. Eight centuries on, St Francis’ uncompromising espousal of the vita apostolica nonetheless has unsettling resonances for some. Discovering myself inside inches of his behavior on the current Nationwide Gallery exhibition on the Franciscans couldn’t however immediate awed reflection.
Pope Francis’ successor extra conventionally selected a well-worn papal identify, turning into Leo XIV. He defined in a short video that ‘there are completely different causes for this, however primarily as a result of Pope Leo XIII in his historic encyclical Rerum novarum addressed the social query within the context of the primary industrial revolution’. Within the encyclical, issued in 1891, Leo XIII (1878-1903) addressed the challenges generated by industrial capitalism, significantly with respect to employees. Closely indebted to St Thomas Aquinas, he developed an impressively subtle evaluation. In line with Leo XIV, we at the moment are present process a second financial transformation of comparable magnitude, within the form of know-how, significantly AI. This poses commensurate challenges to human dignity, to which the Church should reply.
The pope highlighting this cause for his selecting the identify Leo provoked widespread remark, as any point out of AI presently does. It has been little observed that he opens by saying that there are others, too. Which of the 12 earlier popes Leo would possibly he have had in thoughts?
It appears unlikely that both Leo XII (1823-9), who prohibited Jews from proudly owning property within the Papal State, or Leo X (1513-21), whose sale of indulgences to fund the rebuilding a St Peter’s Basilica so outraged Martin Luther, have appealed to Leo XIV. I recommend that he would possibly as an alternative have been considering of three far earlier Leos.
Leo IX (1049-54) refused to just accept election at Worms below Emperor Henry III’s aegis, and insisted on travelling to Rome, dressed as a pilgrim, for a canonical election. He was accompanied for a part of the way in which by a monk referred to as Hildebrand, the longer term Gregory VII (1073-85). Leo initiated the programme later consummated by Gregory: to guard the clergy from secular air pollution by bearing down on nicolaitism (priestly marriage) and simony (sale of clerical workplace). He did so by summoning bishops from all through Christendom to reforming synods over which he presided. They have been now not restricted to the Roman ecclesiastical province and imperial territories; their decrees have been universally binding.
Leo III’s (795-816) crowning of Charlemagne, king of the Franks, as Roman Emperor in St Peter’s on Christmas Day 800 grew to become the epochal occasion in medieval Western European historical past. Though the pope was at that time being protected by Charlemagne, this coronation set the stage for later assertion of the papal proper to get rid of Roman imperial workplace. Leo’s commissioning of a mosaic within the Lateran Palace, depicting St Peter investing him with keys and Charlemagne with a banner, means that he anticipated the ceremony’s eventual significance. The pope’s distinctive plenitudo potestatis (fullness of energy) could be prolonged over lesser Christian rulers too. This papal monarchy would survive till the Reformation.
Each subsequent Pope Leo should have been acutely aware that he might by no means match Leo I (440-61). Like many late vintage popes, Leo was a Roman lawyer. It was he who first outlined with juristic precision the pope’s position as St Peter’s vicar. Every pope was deemed to inherit, in a strictly authorized sense, direct from Peter the judicial powers of binding and loosing on Earth and in heaven that, in keeping with Matthew’s Gospel, Christ had given Peter. The papal workplace was to be Peter on this sense, the rock on which the Church was based, ‘unworthy’ although every inheritor should be in a private sense. Therefore Leo’s repeatedly talking within the voice of Peter, who had come to Rome as essentially the most propitious location for spreading the Gospel. In 410, Leo had witnessed the sacking of Rome by the Goths. In 452, as pope, he persuaded Attila ‘the Hun’ to spare the town. In his ‘Tome’ – a letter addressed to Flavian, patriarch of Constantinople, in response to an enchantment – Leo formulated what grew to become a definitive evaluation of Christ’s Incarnation.
All three of those early Leos of their other ways pointed to very vital developments within the deployment of papal energy to vary the world. Leo I outlined that energy. Leo III’s demarche created the idea for the papal monarchical claims which might dominate Western Christendom through the excessive Center Ages. Leo IX’s quest to revive pristine purity marked a really vital step within the centralisation of papal management over Western church buildings, and the imposition on them of his agenda. Provided that Leo XIII was the primary pope for 1600 years to not rule a papal state, and that the fashionable Holy See regards the lack of that territory within the nineteenth century as a providential liberation from temporal distractions, it appears unlikely that the Holy Spirit had Leo III significantly in thoughts when it impressed Cardinal Prevost to pick his official identify. However Leos I and IX would recommend that it was involved with the upkeep of the pope’s distinctive workplace, with the usage of that workplace to guide and cleanse Christendom, and (in Leo I’s case) with having the braveness to confront secular energy, if to not assert management over it. Leo XIV has already acquired Vice-President Vance and telephoned President Putin.
These issues are prone to be each bit as necessary to Leo XIV as the brand new risk posed by AI. With out them, he is aware of that he wouldn’t be able to addressing that risk. He embodies the oldest establishment on the earth. He should take the lengthy view.
George Garnett is Professor of Medieval Historical past and Fellow of St Hugh’s School at Oxford College.
