(Image source: Jersey Catholic)

Leo XIV has been pope for a year, and since then, he’s mostly avoided headlines and given few interviews. While he’s not completely unknown, Leo XIV doesn’t appear in the spotlight nearly as much as the previous pope. He did show up in the news recently when he refused to join Donald Trump’s Peace Board. His stance on undocumented immigration has been mixed—against “open borders” but in favor of “treating people humanly.” But much about him remains unknown. Even his choice of name—Leo—is a mystery. Strangely, it’s a name with a complicated history, and one aligned with, and celebrated by, the far-right.

At his investiture, Leo XIV explained that chose this name “mainly because” he took inspiration from his predecessor Leo XIII (pope from 1878 to 1903). The new Leo praised Leo XIII for the “historic encyclical Rerum Novarum.” This encyclical, published by Leo XIII in 1891, is today often fondly remembered as a document that promoted social justice. It’s considered the foundation for modern Catholic social doctrine, the Church’s teachings about human dignity and justice. Leo XIV specifically cited Rerum as a reason for choosing his name. But, Leo XIII and Rerum actually promoted a vision of society that right-wing idealogues found appealing.

Leo XIII has many fan-boys on the far-right. Early and often, members of the Trump regime have declared their affinity for Leo XIII and for Rerum. According to the Washington Examiner, J.D. Vance, along with Sen. Josh Hawley and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have often cited Rerum Novarum as a major influence on their economic philosophies. And, conservative outlets have praised how Leo XIII has influenced leading members of the Trump administration.

What these politicians seem to take away from Leo XIII is that he valued hard work and, in Rerum, celebrated working people. In First Things, for example, Marco Rubio cited Rerum in the opening line of an editorial about the value of hard work:

“Almost 130 years ago, Pope Leo XIII published the encyclical Rerum Novarum. In this text, he defended the well-being of workers and made the Catholic Church’s position on work clear: Work and working people have a fundamental dignity that all societies are bound to respect and serve.”

Similarly in Compact, Hawley quoted Leo XIII, again, as a champion of the work ethic:

“‘Bodily labor,’” Leo XIII wrote, is deeply honorable—Christ himself worked with his hands, after all—and absolutely essential to the nation. ‘It is only by the labor of working men that States grow rich,’ Leo pointed out.”

Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank responsible for Project 2025, cites Rerum as a key basis for its political philosophy. The Foundation writes that Catholic Social Teaching is central to the Foundation’s advocacy for “common-good capitalism.” Specifically, “two papal encyclicals, Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, apply foundational ideas to contemporary issues such as the duties of capital and labor and the proper scope of government.”

As the Heritage Foundation goes on to point out, what makes the philosophy of Rerum conservative is its deep admiration for “loyalty to a community’s proper authorities.” And this is where Leo XIII’s rhetoric of work and respect starts to turn reactionary.

Looking more closely at Leo XIII’s teachings show that his concern for workers was grounded in an arch-conservative viewpoint that was paternalistic, opposed to democracy, and decidedly authoritarian. His encyclicals, published in the Victorian period, fed directly into twentieth-century fascist movements.

Today, the new pope Leo XIV may not be fully aware of this history. But in light of how Leo XIII is so popular among the Trump crowd, it’s crucial to better understand Leo XIII, how his supposed concern for workers was undemocratic, and why he has been celebrated on the right for decades.

Leo’s Views on Democracy

Leo XIII lived as a so-called “prisoner in the Vatican.” In 1870, the Kingdom of Italy formed—unifying various Italian states into one and dissolving the pope’s traditional territory. The new Italian nation threatened to make the pope a mere Italian citizen. Leo XIII, elected in 1878, served as the first pope who didn’t reign like a king over his own country. Because he feared he would become subject to secular Italian law, which would thereby diminish the papacy’s autonomy, Leo refused to leave the Vatican.

Leo—feeling literally under siege—frequently wrote about the need for populations to respect traditional authority. During Leo’s tenure as pope, emperors and kings still ruled much of Europe. But liberalism and Marxism threatened the ancien régime. Since the French Revolution of 1789—which seized church property and stripped clerics of their prerogatives—the Church’s power had waned, and Leo XIII spoke out in his encyclicals against “the long-continued and most bitter war waged against the divine authority of the Church,” and preached against what he called “the flames of envy” that cause people to feel “contempt and hatred” for their rightful leaders.

In the wake of how modern revolutions destabilized the Church and threatened the authority of the papacy, Leo discouraged democracy and championed obedience to paternalistic authority.

Since the Enlightenment, liberal philosophers have argued that government only has legitimacy through the consent of the governed, and only when government respects basic rights. In fact, this is a key principle of democracy in the United States, a tenet of the Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the Constitution.

(Image of Pope Leo XIII. Source: Getty Images/Wikipedia)

But Leo rejected these ideas and regarded the core tenets of democracy as fundamentally sinful. In an 1881 encyclical, Diuturnum, Leo chastised “many men of more recent times” who “say that all power comes from the people.” Leo instructed the faithful to “dissent” from this heresy and to “affirm that the right to rule is from God, as from a natural and necessary principle.”

In other words, Leo decried the basis of liberal democracy as what he called “a falsehood and a fiction.” He believed this modern idea violated the Biblical doctrine of the divine right of kings.

Throughout his many encyclicals, Leo XIII instructed the population to submit to their leaders. In Rerum, he preached about the need to “to keep the populace within the line of duty.” And in his 1901 encyclical Graves de communi re, Leo endorsed what he called “the spirit of obedience.” Of course, this isn’t necessarily authoritarian. But what’s troubling about Leo’s attachment to obedience is how he refused to make exceptions. Leo specifically indicated that people must obey governments, even when “the power of the state is rashly and tyrannically wielded.” In cases where governments actively oppress people, Leo declared that “the teaching of the Church does not allow an insurrection.”

Whatever the theological merits of this position, it’s absolutely opposed to the basic premise of democracy, certainly American democracy. For the leaders of the American Revolution, it was a moral obligation to overthrow tyrannical governments. For the signers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, it was understood that governments only have legitimacy when power comes from the people and when the state respects basic rights.

We do not know if contemporaries like Vance, Rubio, and Leo XIV are aware of Leo XIII’s anti-democratic impulses. Today, they often cite Leo XIII as a champion of workers. But on this issue as well, his views were emphatically reactionary.

Leo’s Views on Workers

While Leo XIII is remembered for supporting workers, his actual views about labor were sexist and classist. In fact, in Rerum, Leo XIII advanced proto-fascist positions on sex and class.

For example, when Leo instructed employers to pay working men fair wages, he specifically argued that this was necessary for maintaining conservative gender roles. Leo indicated that women “are not suited for certain occupations,” because “by nature” they should stay within the home. Leo believed that a woman with a breadwinner husband could “preserve her modesty” and “promote the good bringing up of children.”

Just as Leo viewed all individuals as having God-given, gendered roles—based on hierarchy and subordination—Leo also viewed the relationship between employers and employees as “ordained by nature.” In other words, he believed that, just as gender is ordered by God, so too is class hierarchy.

Leo proposed that the “two classes” of laborers and capitalists “should dwell in harmony and agreement”—rather like how he envisioned man and wife as residing in a marriage, naturally constituted by inequality and domination.

Leo saw workers and employers as like limbs, “the different parts of the body.” He taught that both “proletarian and worker” have a natural duty to “bind” (not unlike in a religious marriage). Religion, he said, must “draw the rich and the working class together, by reminding each of its duties to the other.” In Leo’s mystical formulation, political leaders and business owners have a divinely sanctioned right to rule over the population, and—abracadabra—workers will magically fall into line.

Leo rejected the liberal principles of equality of sex and class. Leo’s views today may seem quaint. But Leo’s sexism, his belief in divine right, and his anti-democratic impulses, all amounted to a proto-fascist political theory that sowed the seeds for right-wing authoritarianism. In the 1920s and 1930s, when fascists came to power, many of them drew on Rerum.

The Legacy of Leo and the Rise of the Fascist State

Leo died in 1903, but his teachings were crucial to the rise of fascism in the 1920s. When Mussolini came to power, Catholics under the influence of Leo XIII believed that fascism was the very realization of Rerum.

In 1927, Mussolini inaugurated the legal basis of fascist economic policy with the “Charter of Labor.” As historian D.A. Binchy writes in Church and State in Fascist Italy, “Catholic newspapers welcomed [Mussolini’s] charter as nothing less than the realization of the ideals of Christian social policy set forth by Leo XIII in his Encyclical Rerum Novarum.”

At that time, the rector of the Catholic University announced that Mussolini had inaugurated Leo’s vision of social order. Binchy reports that Catholics throughout the world celebrated fascism as synonymous with Rerum.

Like Rerum, Mussolini’s Charter defined the state as a kind of natural “organism” that demanded obedience. It prescribed work as an unshakable duty. Using Rerum’s language of natural obligation, the Charter directed all workers to join state-run labor syndicates, and all businesses to hire only from those syndicates. Mussolini’s Charter destroyed all individual economic and social rights—in line with Leo’s belief that such rights have no validity—and enforced the kind of “natural” cooperation Leo envisioned.

The Church didn’t object to the widely held view that fascism was perfectly in line with Leo XIII’s teachings. On the contrary, in 1929, Pius XI (three popes after Leo) solved the “prisoner in the Vatican” problem by signing a pact with Mussolini. The Lateran Treaty between Pius XI and Mussolini seemed, for many, to indicate the pope’s endorsement of fascism, while in exchange Mussolini recognized the diplomatic autonomy of Vatican City.

Then in 1931, Pius XI issued a special anniversary encyclical to celebrate Rerum’s birthday. Called Quadragesimo anno (“In the Fortieth Year”), the letter updated Leo XIII’s earlier text for the fascist context.

As Binchy has written, Pius XI’s letter “paid tribute” to the “advantages” of Italian fascism. Pius XI channeled Leo’s authoritarianism and specifically praised Mussolini for outlawing the right of workers to strike. As historian James Nichols writes in Democracy and the Churches, “virtually every Fascist” started to “fly the flag of Quadragesimo.” Once again, most right-wingers understood Rerum and Quadragesimo as fully in line with the fascist project.

Today, it’s not clear what the new pope, Leo XIV, thinks about the ways his namesake served the far right. It seems likely that, over the last hundred-plus years, people have simply forgotten the anti-democratic spirit behind Leo XIII’s teachings and have wanted to believe, sentimentally, that he stood for democracy and equality, when in fact he rejected these concepts.

Perhaps if nothing else, Leo XIV, by choosing this name, calls on us to reopen the great philosophical questions of modernity that are urgently confronting us today.

A.W. Strouse, Ph.D., has written several books, including Form and Foreskin and The Gentrified City of God. Follow Strouse on Instagram @aw_strouse.