Pope Leo XIII

• 1. Introduction

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  Pope Leo XIII stepped in front of a motion picture camera in 1898 and blessed it while the film ran. The inventor W. K. Dickson shot three short segments. In one, the pope sits on a throne. In another, he arrives in a horse-drawn carriage. In the third, he takes a seat on a bench. Because Leo was born in 1810, he may be the earliest-born person known to appear in a film. His voice was recorded too, and he was the first pope to be captured that way. He was the first pope born in the 19th century and the first to die in the 20th, living to the age of 93.

  His birth name was Gioacchino Vincenzo Raffaele Luigi Pecci, and he led the Catholic Church from 1878 until 1903. How did a count's son from a town near Rome come to wear the papal crown? What did he do with one of the longest reigns in the history of the papacy? And how did he steer a church that had lost its lands toward factories, science and a changing Europe?

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• 2. Boyhood and Early Posts

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  Carpineto Romano, a town near Rome, was the birthplace of Gioacchino Pecci, the sixth of seven children. His father, Count Domenico Ludovico Pecci, had served as a colonel in the French army under Napoleon. His mother was Anna Francesca Prosperi-Buzzi. The family treated religion as the highest grace on earth, a path to salvation for all eternity. By the age of eleven the boy was writing his own poems in Latin. He studied with his brother Giuseppe at the Jesuit college in Viterbo until 1824.

  That year their mother lay dying, and the brothers were called to Rome. Their father wanted his children close after the loss, so they stayed and attended the Jesuit Collegium Romanum. In 1828, at 18, Vincenzo chose the secular clergy, while Giuseppe entered the Jesuit order. Vincenzo went on to the Academia dei Nobili, where he studied mainly diplomacy and law.

  In 1834 he gave a student presentation on papal judgments in front of several cardinals. It won him awards for academic excellence and the attention of Vatican officials. During a cholera epidemic in Rome he assisted Cardinal Giuseppe Antonio Sala, who oversaw all of the city's hospitals. In 1836 he received a doctorate in theology, along with doctorates in civil and canon law.

  On the 14th of February 1837, Pope Gregory XVI made the 27-year-old Pecci a personal prelate. He was ordained a priest on the 31st of December 1837 and celebrated his first Mass beside his priest brother Giuseppe. Soon afterwards he went to Benevento as papal legate. It was the smallest papal province, with about 20,000 people. The province suffered from a decaying economy, widespread bandits and Mafia or Camorra structures that often allied with aristocratic families. Pecci arrested the most powerful aristocrat in Benevento. His troops captured others, who were killed or imprisoned. Once order returned, he reformed the tax system to stimulate trade with neighboring provinces.

  On the 17th of July 1841 he was sent to Perugia, a province of 200,000 inhabitants. His first task was preparing for a visit from Gregory XVI, who spent several days touring hospitals and schools. The fight against corruption went on there. When someone claimed a bakery was selling bread below the prescribed weight, Pecci went in person and had every loaf weighed. He confiscated whatever fell short, and the bread went to the poor.

  In 1843, at only 33, he became Apostolic Nuncio to Belgium. On the 27th of April 1843 Gregory XVI appointed him archbishop and asked Cardinal Lambruschini to consecrate him. Belgium was debating the school question, which divided the Catholic majority from the liberal minority. Pecci encouraged the struggle for Catholic schools, yet still won the goodwill of the pious Queen Louise and of the strongly liberal King Leopold I. At the end of his mission the king granted him the Grand Cordon in the Order of Leopold.

  In 1844, on his initiative, a Belgian College opened in Rome. In 1946, 102 years later, the future Pope John Paul II began his Roman studies there. Pecci also visited Germany, where he followed the completion of Cologne Cathedral with particular interest. He spent several weeks in England with Bishop Nicholas Wiseman, reviewing the condition of the Catholic Church there. The Belgian post carried the promise of a cardinal's hat, but that promise would take years to fulfil.

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• 3. Perugia Years

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  In 1847 Pope Pius IX granted unlimited freedom to the press in the Papal States, and Archbishop Pecci of Perugia suddenly found himself attacked in print and at his own residence. Only a few years earlier he had been highly popular. The revolutionary movements of 1848 in France, Germany and Italy made matters worse. Austrian, French and Spanish troops reversed the revolutionary gains, but the church and Pecci paid a price. Neither regained their former popularity.

  He answered with work. In 1849 he called a provincial council to reform religious life in his dioceses, and it was there that the need for a Syllabus of Errors was discussed. He enlarged the seminary and hired prominent professors, preferably Thomists. He asked his brother Giuseppe, a noted Thomist scholar, to give up his chair in Rome and teach in Perugia. Pecci's own residence stood next to the seminary, so he met the students every day.

  His charities were just as concrete. He founded homeless shelters for boys, girls and elderly women. Across his dioceses he opened branches of a bank called Monte di Pietà, which gave low-interest loans to people with little money. Soup kitchens ran under the Capuchins. Earthquakes and floods were continuing when he became a cardinal in late 1853, so he gave all the resources set aside for the celebrations to the victims.

  The red hat came in the consistory of the 19th of December 1853, with the title of Cardinal-Priest of San Crisogono. Gregory XVI had once meant to make him a cardinal, and one account holds that he reserved Pecci in pectore in January 1846. The pope died just over four months later, so the name was never made public. Pius IX repeatedly offered Pecci a diocese near Rome, and Pecci kept refusing because he preferred Perugia. The story that Pius IX sent him there as an exile for liberal views is, according to the account, not true.

  The new Italian state pressed the church on every side. When authorities expropriated convents and monasteries and turned them into administrative or military buildings, Pecci protested but acted moderately. When the state took over Catholic schools, he feared for his seminary. He added the secular subjects taught elsewhere and opened it to students who were not training for the priesthood. The government also taxed the church and required that every episcopal or papal statement be approved before publication.

  On the 8th of December 1869 the First Vatican Council was due to open at the Vatican under Pius IX. Pecci was likely well informed, since the pope named his brother Giuseppe to help prepare it. During the 1870s he spoke several times about the church and modern society. He called the church the mother of material civilization, because it upheld the dignity of working people, opposed the excesses of industrialization and ran large charities for the needy.

  In August 1877, after the death of Cardinal Filippo de Angelis, Pius IX appointed him Camerlengo, which required him to live in Rome. The pope reportedly told him: "Monsignor, I have decided to summon you to the Senate of the Church. I feel sure this will be the first act of my pontificate that you will not feel called upon to criticize." Stories of mutual animosity between the two have never been proven. Pecci was also said to have hoped for the bishopric of Albano or the post of datary. Cardinal Antonelli allegedly blocked a chance to lead Propaganda Fide.

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• 4. The Conclave of 1878

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  Pope Pius IX died on the 7th of February 1878, and the cardinals gathered in Rome on the 18th of February. They faced questions about relations between church and state in Europe, especially Italy. They also weighed divisions within the church and the unfinished business of the First Vatican Council. Some proposed holding the conclave somewhere else. Pecci, as camerlengo, decided against it.

  Pecci was seen as the leading candidate, with Cardinals Flavio Chigi and Tommaso Martinelli also mentioned. Several cardinals, Henry Edward Manning among them, agreed beforehand to support him and to insist that the next pope be Italian. Manning and Edward Henry Howard also took on the job of persuading the foreign cardinals.

  The long reign of the conservative Pius IX shaped the mood. Many cardinals were generally believed to have voted for Pecci because his age and health suggested a brief papacy. Pius IX was said to have favored Cardinal Luigi Bilio. Many cardinals he had created wanted to honor him by voting for Bilio. They also feared that an ultra-conservative might draw a veto from a European power. There was early talk of Austria vetoing Bilio, though it never happened.

  A group of opponents grew alarmed as Pecci's totals rose. They banded together behind Cardinal Alessandro Franchi, but Franchi received no votes on the final ballot. Pecci was elected on the third scrutiny with 44 of 61 votes, well past the two-thirds required.

  He took the name Leo in memory of Leo XII, whom he admired for his interest in education and his conciliatory attitude toward foreign governments. Asked which name he would use, he answered: "As Leo XIII, in remembrance of Leo XII, whom I have always venerated". The result was announced to Rome and the world at 1:15 pm, and he was crowned on the 3rd of March 1878.

  John Henry Newman is reported to have greeted the news with warm words: "In the successor of Pius I recognize a depth of thought, a tenderness of heart, a winning simplicity, and a power answering to the name of Leo, which prevent me from lamenting that Pius is no longer here." Even as pope, Leo kept the administration of the Perugia see in his own hands until 1880.

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• 5. Diplomacy Across Continents

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  By 1870 the Papal States had been dissolved. Leo XIII was therefore the first pope since Stephen II, in the 8th century, with no control over them. His answer was diplomacy. The Holy See set out to win back international standing by acting as an arbiter of disputes between states. Leo also favored shared interests with the European colonial powers, quietly supporting missions organized along national lines.

  His first letter to Tsar Alexander II was friendly. It reminded the tsar of the millions of Catholics in his empire, who wished to be good Russian subjects if their dignity were respected. After Alexander II was assassinated, Leo sent a high-ranking representative to the coronation of Alexander III. The new tsar was grateful and asked all religious forces to unify. Relations improved further when Leo, for Italian reasons, distanced the Vatican from the Rome-Vienna-Berlin alliance and helped bring Paris and St. Petersburg closer.

  Otto von Bismarck's Prussia had pressed the church hard through the Kulturkampf, including the Jesuits Law of 1872. During Leo's papacy, compromises were reached informally and the attacks subsided. Emperor Wilhelm II later wrote of a friendly and trustful relationship with the pope. On his third visit, Wilhelm recalled, Leo said that Germany must be the sword of the Catholic Church. Wilhelm answered that the old Roman Empire of the German nation no longer existed. Leo held to his words.

  France was the country Leo loved most. He feared that the Third Republic, seeing that most French Catholics were Royalists, might abolish the Concordat of 1801. On the advice of Cardinal Rampolla he urged them to "rally" to the republic. Many monarchists felt forced to betray their king for their faith. The move split the French church politically and reduced its influence. It also failed to save the Concordat, which a 1905 law ended after Leo's death.

  At home the climate was harsher. On the 13th of July 1881, anticlerical groups tried to throw the corpse of Pius IX into the Tiber. Leo kept the papacy inside the Vatican and told Italian Catholics not to vote or hold elected office. The pope even considered moving to Trieste or Salzburg, an idea Emperor Franz Joseph I gently rejected.

  Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg became Prince of Bulgaria in 1886, and Leo welcomed it, since both were Catholics. Relations soured when Ferdinand planned to let his eldest son, Crown Prince Boris, convert to Orthodoxy. Leo condemned the plan. When Ferdinand went ahead anyway, Leo excommunicated him.

  In Britain, Leo restored the Scottish hierarchy in 1878. On the 12th of May 1879 he made the convert theologian John Henry Newman a cardinal. Newman would be beatified in 2010 and canonized in 2019. In 1896 the encyclical Apostolicae curae ruled that Anglican orders were invalid. In 1899 Leo declared the Venerable Bede a Doctor of the Church.

  China brought Leo a defeat. In the 1880s he tried to open relations, but France, which claimed a religious protectorate there, blocked the effort. Paris threatened to withdraw its ambassador to the Holy See and punish the Catholic Church in France. The Holy See gave way. Leo called the failure "the greatest sorrow of his pontificate."

  The United States won his admiration. He confirmed the decrees of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 and raised Archbishop James Gibbons of Baltimore to cardinal in 1886. On the 10th of April 1887 a charter from Leo founded the Catholic University of America. American newspapers claimed he wanted control of public schools. One cartoon drew him as a fox who cannot reach grapes labeled for American schools, with the caption "Sour grapes!"

  In 1888 his encyclical In plurimis, addressed to the bishops of Brazil, dealt with the abolition of slavery. The First Plenary Council of Latin America met in Rome in 1899. For India he wrote "Filii tui India, administri tibi salutis", meaning "Your own sons, O India, will be the heralds of your salvation." Apostolic Delegate Ladislaus Michael Zaleski then founded the Papal Seminary in 1893. On the 11th of September 1881, the Catalan national day, Leo proclaimed the Virgin of Montserrat Patron of Catalonia, which influenced Catalan nationalism.

  His last notable encounter came in 1902, when he met William Howard Taft, the American Governor-General of the Philippines. Taft wanted the United States government to buy land from Catholic friars. Leo refused to allow it.

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• 6. Aquinas and the Rosary

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  On the 4th of August 1879 Leo issued Aeterni Patris, Latin for "Eternal Father". More than any other single document, it provided a charter for reviving Thomism, the medieval system built on the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Leo wanted it to be the official philosophical and theological system of the church. It was to shape the training of priests and the education of laypeople at universities.

  On the 15th of October 1879 he created the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. He also ordered a critical edition of the complete works of Aquinas, called the Leonine Edition. Tommaso Maria Zigliara, rector of the Collegium Divi Thomae de Urbe, oversaw the project. That college is today the Angelicum, where Leo founded the Faculty of Philosophy in 1882 and the Faculty of Canon Law in 1896.

  Leo insisted that science and religion could coexist. He opened the Vatican Secret Archives to qualified researchers, among them the Austrian historian Ludwig von Pastor, whose comprehensive study of the papacy ran to 20 volumes. In 1892 the archives were opened to William Eleroy Curtis, an envoy planning a commemoration of Christopher Columbus. Leo also refounded the Vatican Observatory. His stated purpose was "so that everyone might see clearly that the Church and her Pastors are not opposed to true and solid science, whether human or divine, but that they embrace it, encourage it, and promote it with the fullest possible devotion."

  His 1893 encyclical Providentissimus Deus described the importance of scripture for theological study. Pope Pius XII pointed to its importance 50 years later in Divino afflante Spiritu. In 1894 the encyclical Orientalium dignitas called for preserving the liturgies of Eastern Catholics.

  Devotion mattered as much to him as scholarship. Pius IX had been known as the pope of the Immaculate Conception, after proclaiming that dogma in 1854. Leo wrote a record eleven encyclicals on the rosary and earned the name Rosary Pope. In one marking the 50th anniversary of that dogma, he called Mary Mediatrix and Co-Redemptrix. Recent popes, following the Second Vatican Council, have warned away from the second title.

  He approved a series of scapulars. The Scapular of the Holy Face came in 1885, and he raised the Priests of the Holy Face to an archconfraternity. In 1893 he approved the Scapular of Our Lady of Good Counsel and the Scapular of St. Joseph. The Scapular of the Sacred Heart followed in 1900.

  The Sacred Heart led to one of his boldest acts. Sister Mary of the Divine Heart, the countess of Droste zu Vischering, wrote to him many times from the Convent of the Good Shepherd Sisters in Porto, Portugal. She asked him to consecrate the entire world to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Leo commissioned theologians to test the request against revelation and sacred tradition, and they judged it sound. In the encyclical Annum sacrum, dated the 25th of May 1899, he set the consecration of the human race for the 11th of June 1899. The letter also promoted First Friday devotions and made June the Month of the Sacred Heart. In 1890 he had already entrusted monthly prayer intentions to the Apostleship of Prayer.

  One story has no such paper trail. A common account says that on the 13th of October 1884, Leo collapsed after Mass in what looked like a coma but was a mystical ecstasy. He then hurried to his apartment and wrote the Prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel, after seeing a vision of demons driven back into Hell. He ordered that it be said after every Low Mass. In 1934 the German writer Father Bers found no proof of the vision. Sources close to the prayer's creation in 1886, including an account of a talk with Leo, never mention it. Bers concluded that the story was a later invention that spread like a virus.

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• 7. The Worker's Pope

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  In 1891 Leo published Rerum novarum, and for the first time a pope used full papal authority to address social inequality and the rights and duties of capital and labour. A German bishop, Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, had influenced him with his book Die Arbeiterfrage und das Christentum, which urged siding with the suffering working classes.

  The encyclical defended the right of workers to a fair wage, safe working conditions and trade unions. It also affirmed property rights and free enterprise. It found fault with both atheistic socialism and laissez-faire capitalism. It brought the principle of subsidiarity into Catholic social thought, the idea that decisions should be made at the local level when possible rather than by a central authority. The encyclical earned him the popular titles Social Pope and Pope of the Workers.

  The background was an economic order that had produced a poor working class with growing anticlerical and socialist sympathies. Leo helped reverse that trend. The Centre Party in Germany represented Catholic interests and was a force for social change, and it drew encouragement from his support for social welfare legislation. His approach inspired Catholic Action in other European countries. Christian democratic parties built the church's social teachings into their agendas and became an acceptable alternative to socialist parties. His successors repeated those teachings throughout the 20th century.

  Rerum novarum was one of 86 encyclicals he wrote during his papacy. His care for the poor also had a practical side. When the fifth cholera pandemic struck in 1891, he ordered a hospice built inside the Vatican. That building was torn down in 1996 to make room for the Domus Sanctae Marthae.

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• 8. Final Years and Legacy

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  Angelo Mariani, creator of the cocaine-infused wine tonic Vin Mariani, received a Vatican gold medal from Leo XIII. The pope also appeared on a poster endorsing the drink, a precursor of Coca-Cola. He was a semi-vegetarian. In 1903 he credited his longevity to sparing use of meat and to eggs, milk and vegetables. His favorite poets were Virgil and Dante.

  Visitors left their own record of him. In July 1884 he received the French author Jules Verne and his family in a private audience, aware of Verne's scientific style of writing. In 1887 Thérèse of Lisieux came on a pilgrimage with her father and sister. Though she had been forbidden to speak, she asked him to let her enter the Carmelite order. He told her: "If it is God's will that you should enter the Convent, then it shall be".

  His health had been uneven since his election in 1878, when a poorly done bloodletting left a slight tremor in his hand. In March 1899 many believed he was dying of pneumonia. The real cause was an inflamed cyst that had troubled him for almost thirty years. He refused surgery at first, until Cardinal Mariano Rampolla persuaded him. During the operation his chaplain celebrated Mass in the private chapel, and the cyst was reportedly the size of an orange. Late in life he used a gold-headed cane. Whenever rumors spread about his health, he mischievously walked briskly to dispel them.

  On the 30th of June 1903 he reported slight dyspepsia and took castor oil, shrugging off concern. On the 3rd of July he caught a cold in the Vatican Gardens, and it quickly turned to pneumonia. He lost consciousness that night. He insisted on the doctor who had treated him in 1899 rather than a second opinion. On the 4th of July he made his last confession to Cardinal Serafino Vannutelli.

  On the 5th of July, after receiving the sacraments, he said: "I am now near my end. I do not know if all I have done has been good, but I certainly obeyed my conscience and our faith". When doctors gave him oxygen, he replied: "That is much better. Before I felt as though I had lost my liberty". He told those near him that he would prefer Cardinal Girolamo Maria Gotti as his successor. On the 7th of July he asked for the window shutters to be opened, saying: "I wish to see once more, perhaps for the last time, the rays of the sun". On the 10th of July he received Hungarian pilgrims, then collapsed from exhaustion.

  Leo XIII died at 3:55 pm on the 20th of July 1903, whispering a final blessing. Vatican officials recorded the time as 4:06 pm. The cause was pneumonia, followed by hemorrhagic pleurisy. He was entombed only briefly in Saint Peter's Basilica. In late 1924 his remains were moved to the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, his cathedral church as Bishop of Rome and a church that interested him greatly. No pope was buried outside Saint Peter's after him until Francis was interred at Santa Maria Maggiore in 2025.

  His choice of successor was not the man he had hoped for. Over 27 consistories he named 147 cardinals, and in 1893 one of them was Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto. Sarto became Pope Pius X in 1903. Pope Paul VI called Leo great and wise, his first teacher, from whom he inherited a pastoral outlook. Saint Leo University in Florida is partly named for him. When Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected in 2025 and chose the name Leo XIV, he said Rerum novarum was one of his main reasons.

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