They said it would never happen: an American pope, let alone an American pope while Donald Trump is president of the United States. But the Lord works in mysterious ways. On Thursday, Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago made history after his fellow cardinals elected him the 267th successor of Saint Peter.

Yet just as meaningful as his US background is the new pontiff’s choice of name: Leo XIV.

The last time the Roman church had a Leo pope, it was Leo XIII in the late 19th century. The fourth-longest reigning pontiff ever, Leo was a pivotal figure in the life of the Church — and the secular world. He revitalised Thomism (the thought of the medieval sage Thomas Aquinas), promoted Catholic schools, and instituted the beloved prayer to the Archangel Michael: “Defend us in battle, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil…”

Most notably, Pope Leo inaugurated modern Catholic Social Teaching, a body of doctrine aimed at addressing the crises and social dislocations associated with the industrial age. In his encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of the New Things”), issued in 1891, he railed against “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals and the utter poverty of the masses”.

At times, his diagnosis of social conditions under capitalism could sound remarkably like the ones put forward by Marx and Engels. You could easily trick American Catholic audiences into believing that it was Marx who denounced the way “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” — and only afterward reveal that, no, it was Leo XIII who said that.

Pope Leo’s solution to these crises, however, differed markedly from the Marxist one. Indeed, Leo abominated socialism. Instead of dreaming of capitalism’s complete overthrow and the abolition of private property, Rerum Novarum called on governments to ensure a living wage and to allow workers to band together in labour unions to boost their bargaining power and defend their mutual interests.

These proposals jibed closely with the movements for social and Christian democracy that took hold in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and that found an American expression in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Instead of class warfare, these tendencies promoted class reconciliation in a way that was distinctly Catholic. To be clear, reconciliation didn’t mean singing Kumbaya: it required the balancing of different social forces — capital and labour, church and civil society — and a state willing to intervene when “spontaneous” forces hindered the common good, aka market failure.

Which brings us to Pope Leo XIV. The American prelate has kept a relatively low profile, though already US-conservative malcontents are trawling his public record for signs of ideological deviationism: he retweeted a message of condolence to George Floyd’s family in May 2020! — well, so did then-President Trump. He promoted Covid vaccines in August 2021! — well, so did the New York Post and many other Right-wing figures and outlets at that point.

Yet Pope Leo XIV’s choice of name says far more about where his heart lies than this or that Twitter post. In a 21st century that starkly resembles the 19th — not least in its eye-watering material inequalities and the overweening power of some few tyrannical CEOs — the Church now has a universal pastor who is clearly in love with the Leonine tradition and bent on renewing Catholic Social Teaching for the New Things of our time. Long may he reign.

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