Leo XIII
Leo XIII (Latin: Leo PP. XIII), secular name Gioacchino Vicenzo Raffaele Luigi Pecci (Carpineto Romano, March 2, 1810-Rome, July 20, 1903), was 256.o Pope of the Catholic Church. His twenty-five-year pontificate lasted between 1878 and 1903.
Biography
Early Years
Born in Carpineto Romano, near Rome, he was the sixth of seven children born to Count Ludovico Pecci and his wife Anna Prosperi Buzzi. His brothers were Giuseppe and Giovanni Battista Pecci. His family belonged to the small rural nobility. His father was a war commissioner and colonel. Already in his youth he was noted as a great Latinist, and in his maturity he would be a well-known humanist, a skilled writer of poems and letters in Latin. He was a student at the Jesuit College of Viterbo, where he studied until 1824. Between 1824 and 1832, he studied Theology at the Collegium Romanum.
Episcopate and cardinalate
In 1843 he was consecrated titular archbishop of Damietta (Tamiathis) and assigned as nuncio in Brussels, where he remained until 1846. Shortly after he was appointed bishop of Perugia with the rank of archbishop ad personam. In 1849 he presided over a provincial council held in Spoleto, at whose initiative the conciliar agreement was reached to ask Pius IX to promulgate a constitution condemning the various errors regarding the Church, authority and property —already condemned separately previously—, making a brief contest of them, and that was valued as very useful for the Catholic parishioner. This document was later known when it was published as Syllabus.
On December 19, 1856, Pius IX named him cardinal-priest of San Crisogono.
Papal election
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In the following years, Italian Unification took place, which meant the liquidation of the Papal States and the radical confrontation between the Catholic Church and the liberal State (especially, the new Kingdom of Italy). The moderate position that Cardinal Pecci maintained on these issues made him an ideal candidate to ease tensions, a reason that probably influenced the decision of the College of Cardinals to elect him pope when Pius IX died in 1878.
In fact, in a conclave of only two days and after the third ballot, Gioacchino Pecci was elected pope on February 20, 1878. The following March 3, he was crowned in Saint Peter's Basilica by Cardinal Teodolfo Mertel, Cardinal Deacon of San Eustaquio, by delegation of Cardinal Prospero Caterini, Protodeacon of S. Maria in Via Lata and ad commendam of S. Maria della Scala, who was ill.
Papacy
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Leo XIII was concerned from the beginning of his mandate to improve the intellectual foundations of the clergy, moving away in doctrinal terms from the mere defensive attitude of his predecessor. To this end, in 1879 he appointed four cardinals dedicated exclusively to studies (among them, the scholar John Henry Newman), and on August 4 of that year —in the encyclical Aeterni Patris— he presented Thomism as the philosophy to be followed by Catholics to face the problems of their time.
The first years of his pontificate were marked by a series of academic initiatives: the founding of a new institute in Rome for the study of philosophy and theology, centers for the study of the Scriptures, and an astronomical center. In addition, the Vatican archives were opened to both Catholic and non-Catholic scholars. He lived lavishly and frugally during his pontificate.
His long pontificate brought the Church closer to the realities of the modern world. Faced with the growing labor problem, in 1891 he released the encyclical Rerum novarum ( About new things ). It deplored the oppression and virtual enslavement of the vastly poor by "a handful of very rich people" and advocated fair wages and the right to organize (preferably Catholic) unions, while vigorously rejecting socialism and showing little enthusiasm for the institutions of liberal democracy and labor unionism. Classes and inequality, affirmed Leo XIII, constitute unalterable features of the human condition, as are property rights. He condemned socialism as illusory and synonymous with hatred and atheism.
The political realism and diplomatic skill of Leo XIII allowed to put an end to the hostility of the German imperial regime towards Catholics (with chancellor Otto von Bismarck leaving the Kulturkampf in 1879 and visit to Rome by Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany in 1888). Similarly, he advocated the end of the confrontation between the French Church and the Third Republic, endorsing the participation of French Catholics in the republican regime. On the contrary, he maintained the Numantine confrontation with the Italian State, insisting on the boycott of Italian Catholics to the national political life.
Leo XIII thought that the papal diplomatic service should play a leading role both in consolidating the internal discipline of the Church and in conducting Church-State relations. In 1885, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom resorted to him as a mediator in the dispute over the possession of the Caroline Islands, in the Pacific, Spain being the one who got them; although in return, Germany took the Marshall Islands. As early as 1899, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Queen Wilhelmina I of the Netherlands benefited from his good offices in attempting to convene a peace conference of all the countries of Europe.
Reflecting on the diplomacy of the Holy See with the help of the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his encyclical Immortale Dei (1885) he restated the relationship between the Holy See and the nation-states. The papal nuncio, in Leo XIII's view, was the representative of the pope's spiritual sovereignty in the same way that an ambassador represents the political sovereignty of his country.
He strengthened ties with the American Church, fostering the spread of Catholicism in the United States. With all this, Leo XIII contributed to giving the Church a new leading role on a global scale, reinforced by two types of his initiatives: on the one hand, the rapprochement with the Anglican Communion and the Greek Orthodox, which initiated the ecumenical trend of the popes of the century XX; and on the other, the impulse of missionary action, especially in Africa.
He had a special interest in promoting the recitation of the Holy Rosary, to which he dedicated various encyclicals. It is worth mentioning that, at the beginning of his papacy —on April 16, 1879—, the death of Bernadette Soubirous, seer of the Marian apparitions in Lourdes, to whom Leo XIII sent his blessing before dying, occurred. The Virgin Mary who, under the invocation of Our Lady of Lourdes, said of herself "I am the Immaculate Conception", had presented herself -according to Bernadette's account- with a rosary in her hands, which would not go unnoticed by the mind of the pontiff
In his twenty-five years as papacy, he named a total of 147 cardinals in 27 consistories.
Death
Died in Rome on July 20, 1903; he had been the first pope to be born in the 19th century, and he was also the first to die in the XX. He lived to the age of 93, making him the third-longest-lived pope. At the time of his death, Leo XIII was the third-longest-serving pope, second only to Peter (34–37). years) and his predecessor, Pius IX (31 years). He was initially entombed in St. Peter's Basilica; however, in 1924 his remains were moved to the Basilica of St. John Lateran, his cathedral as Bishop of Rome, and a church in which he had a particular interest.
Documents of Leo XIII
During his long pontificate, numerous pontifical documents were promulgated: