Image credit: Vatican News 

By Michael A. Dauphinais, Ph.D. 

Habemus papam. We have a new pope. Habemus nomen. We have a new name. Pope Leo XIV! 

I want to reflect on the two Leos that bookend the line of the former thirteen Leos: Pope Leo the Great and Pope Leo XIII. Together they leave us a witness of leadership of the Church and of the wider culture rooted in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Across the many centuries separating them, both Leos show that social renewal flows from fidelity to moral and doctoral truths.

How Pope Leo the Great Defended Christ and Shaped the Church

Pope Saint Leo the Great became pope in 440 and reigned until his death in 461. The fifth century was a time of tremendous political upheaval as the Roman Empire fell in the West to the invading Germanic tribes. Amid this political vacuum and chaos, Pope Leo helped the Catholic Church provide administrative reforms and political and moral guidance. In many ways, the world of Medieval Christendom was born from Leo the Great’s legacy and leadership. 

Pope Leo the Great also shepherded the Catholic Church through a period of doctrinal confusion about who Jesus Christ is. Leo’s Tome, as his lengthy letter became known, rejected the Monophysite view that Christ’s human nature was so fully absorbed by his divine nature that only his divine nature was left.  Monophysitism removed Jesus Christ from our human experience and left God in an almost disincarnate divine reality. 

Leo the Great, however, affirmed that the one divine Person of the Son of God exists in a fully divine nature from all eternity and came to exist in a human nature in time. Two natures in one divine person. One person with two births: a birth in all eternity from the Father; a birth in time from Mary. Leo’s defense of the Catholic teaching was promulgated by the Council of Chalcedon in 451.  This is necessary for our salvation. Because Jesus is fully God, he can save us.  Because Jesus is fully man, he can save us. 

How Pope Leo XIII Confronted Atheism and Marxism 

Pope Leo XIII reigned at the end of the tumultuous nineteenth century from 1878 until 1903. This was a time of the final loss of the remnants of the shared vision of medieval Catholicism. Atheism was spreading around Europe, as was its political relative, Marxist communism. Leo XIII responded by developing what became known as Catholic Social Teaching in his great encyclical Rerum Novarum. There Leo rejected communism as a cure that was worse than the disease. The real social problems needed to be addressed by recovering the dignity of the worker, his right to unionize and to a just wage, a recovered vision of private property, and the family as the fundamental cell of society.   

Leo XIII restored St. Thomas Aquinas as the foundational teacher in the Catholic Church for philosophy and theology in his encyclical Aeterni Patris. Leo knew that the popular nineteenth-century philosophies of atheism and communism were not adequate to defending the nature of the human person, the role of the family, and the proper aims and limits of governments. Aquinas’s philosophical and theological realism, however, could do so. Truth is knowable—in the scientific area, in the moral realm, and in divine revelation. 

Why the Name “Leo” Matters: Returning to the Truth of Jesus Christ 

Pope Leo the Great and Pope Leo XIII shepherded Catholics through periods of political and doctrinal chaos by returning to the truth of Jesus Christ as proclaimed in the creeds of the Catholic Church. Because Jesus Christ is both Creator and creature, his divine revelation and salvation shape the way we understand the political order, the family, and the person. Most of all, both Pope Leos remind us that earthly existence is not our goal. We will never overcome sin and death in this life. Christ—and Christ alone—offers us the salvation we genuinely need, namely, that of eternal life with the most Holy Trinity and all the saints.   

Please join me in praying for our new dear Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV.  May the Lord bless him with strength, light, and wisdom to shepherd the Church as did these great Leos.

Michael Dauphinais, Ph.D. is the Father Matthew Lamb Professor of Catholic Theology at Ave Maria University. He hosts the Catholic Theology Show podcast, and is an established author, co-authoring Knowing the Love of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas and Holy People, Holy Land: A Theological Introduction to the Bible with Matthew Levering. Michael and his wife Nancy have been blessed with over 30 years of marriage and have three adult sons.