Pope Leo XIII
Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci
Pope · 1810–1903
Who is Pope Leo XIII?
Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci was born in Carpineto Romano, Italy, in 1810 and was elected pope in 1878, going on to lead the Catholic Church for twenty-five years, one of the longest pontificates in history. He is best remembered for his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which addressed the conditions of industrial workers amid the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution and laid the foundation for modern Catholic social teaching on labor rights, private property, and the relationship between capital and workers. Leo XIII also worked to modernize the Church's engagement with contemporary science and philosophy, promoting the revival of the study of Thomas Aquinas, and he opened the Vatican Secret Archives to qualified scholars in 1881. He navigated the Church's difficult relationship with the newly unified Kingdom of Italy following the loss of the Papal States in 1870. He died in 1903 at the age of ninety-three, then the oldest pope in history.
Sources: Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, encyclical, 15 May 1891 · Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, encyclical, 4 August 1879 · Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (2014)