Pope Leo XIV tells cardinals he chose his name in response to artificial intelligence

Filed retrospectively. Before the Specola kept its nightly watch, these were the observations that turned the telescope.

On May 10, 2025, two days after his election on May 8, Pope Leo XIV addressed the College of Cardinals and explained why he had taken the name Leo. The stated reason was artificial intelligence.

“I chose to take the name Leo XIV,” he told the cardinals. “There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.”

Rerum Novarum, published in 1891, founded modern Catholic social teaching as a response to industrialization and its effects on workers. By invoking it, the new pope framed AI as the social question of the present age and positioned his pontificate as the Church’s answer to it, in explicit continuity with his namesake.

The remark set the agenda for what followed. Within a year, Leo XIV would sign his first encyclical on exactly this subject, dated to the anniversary of Rerum Novarum itself.