Numerous world leaders and more than 250,000 people will attend the inauguration ceremony of Pope Leo XIV, the first US Pope in the history of Catholicism, this Sunday.
Thus will begin the new Leonine era that will officially bring to a close the pontificate of Pope Francis.
Thanks to his choice of pontifical name and his mathematical and legal training, Pope Leo XIV has awakened hope and curiosity about the influences the Catholic Church could exert on the economic world during his pontificate, among the faithful but also in the more secular world.
For many observers and experts on Vatican affairs, Leo XIV could bring doctrinal order to his predecessor Francis’ outbursts against poverty, the result of social injustice and environmental devastation.
As the Holy Father said in his first address to the College of Cardinals on Saturday 10 May:
“I thought of taking the name of Leo XIV for several reasons, however, principally because of Pope Leo XIII, who, with his historic encyclical Rerum Novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,”
The encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Things) was promulgated by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. It is regarded by historians as the Church’s first step into modernity.
With Rerum Novarum, the Church called for rights for workers without resorting to the class struggle promoted by Marxist doctrine, but through the balance of fair wages and equal economic relations.
Rerum Novarum laid the foundations of the Social Doctrine of the Church that inspired Catholic trade unionism and some thirty years later the creation of the Christian Democratic parties that contributed decisively to the civil and material reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War.
The Social Doctrine of the Church
For Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, banker and former president of the Institute for Religious Works (IOR) the great Vatican financial institution, Leo XIII was “a prophetic pope” because the debate on the preparation of the new encyclical, which had begun a few years earlier, conditioned the ideas of the economic powers of the Belle Époque, especially the young United States in full growth.
Gotti Tedeschi adds: “Pope Leo XIII questioned the concentrations of economic industrial power and was immediately attacked (by the political and religious sectors that supported a nascent and unregulated capitalism) but after six months the United States passed the Sherman Act on monopolies and elaborated the basis of antitrust agencies to regulate competition”.
The Sherman Act was passed by the US administration in 1890 to curb the power of cartels that had created a near-monopoly regime with serious social repercussions.
“Today the Church offers to all its patrimony of social doctrine to respond to another industrial revolution and to developments in artificial intelligence that bring new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and work,” the new pope reminded the Cardinals in his recent address.
The European Union and the public authorities of our time are measured against the dominant positions of the large American technological companies, the so-called Big-Tech, while economic data show growing economic crises and imbalances between average incomes and the cost of living on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
If the question of a new Social Doctrine of the Church has been clarified by the words of the Pontiff himself, it is still unclear how the new Pope will launch the evangelising action necessary to persuade the main economic and political players of the value of the contents of a new encyclical on the social duties of capital.
A new missionary work in finance and high technology?
Will the new pontiff have to confront the great oligarchs as the Church Fathers did with pagan princes and rulers in the first centuries of Christianity?
For Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, “evangelisation in the world of finance that seems so indifferent or even needs to have certain values explained to it. We need to reread Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate, the encyclical of globalisation and technological progress”, drafted and amended during the debt crisis that shook Europe and the United States between 2008 and the early 2010s, the worst financial collapse since the Wall Street crash of 1929.
Ettore Gotti Tedeschi co-authored Caritas in Veritate with Benedict XVI. Through this encyclical, Benedict XVI emphasised the importance of defining what the economy is and what its ultimate goals are with a profound revision of the development models imposed by globalisation and digitalisation.
This work was continued and reinterpreted by Pope Francis, who in addition to his fighting against economic injustice also engaged in the study of Artificial Intelligence.
In 2024, he gave a speech at the G7 Intergovernmental Forum in Italy where he said “artificial intelligence is a product of human creative potential, a gift from God”. And he spoke of ‘algoethics’, the morality of the algorithm.
“Pope Francis’ priority on artificial intelligence is that technology be understood for its social impact, since it represents a form of power that redefines relations between people,” Paolo Benanti, a Franciscan, a scholar of the Ethics of Technology and professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University, told Wired magazine a few months ago.
Father Benanti was considered to be Pope Francis’ contact person for AI and is the only Italian member of the United Nations’ Committee on Artificial Intelligence, as well as chairman of the Commission on Artificial Intelligence for Information of the Department for Information and Publishing of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.
The new financial and doctrinal role of the US
Leo XIV is the first US Pope in the thousand-year history of the Church.
In the Holy See, his election has awakened hopes that the new Pope can help fix the Vatican’s strained finances by attracting new flows of dollars.
St Peter’s obolus is historically the financial lung of the Catholic Church, representing the flow of money from all the world’s alms.
“Fifty per cent of St Peter’s obolus traditionally came from the United States. From what I have read, St Peter’s obolus has plummeted to about 50 per cent in the last decade. What can Leo do? Set about revangelising and reaffirming the truths that influence the Catholic world. In six months he will balance the budget, says Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, who concludes by saying that US Vice-President JD Vance affirmed those truths and laid down his conditions in Munich last February, saying ‘reconfirm the values and we will be totally on your side’.
Pope Leo XIV for the time being seems to have sent messages of a certain social sensibility from an economic point of view, and at the same time more traditional from the point of view of aesthetic or symbolic presence and the content of doctrinal values.
*** In 2012, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi was removed from the presidency of the IOR on charges of allegedly violating anti-money laundering laws. In 2014, the GIP of the Court of Rome ruled out Gotti Tedeschi’s responsibility, dismissing the case.The former Vatican banker stated that the judicial misadventure was linked to his attempts to make the Institute for Religious Works more transparent.***
