The popes never choose the name on a whim. Each name is a declaration of intent, a theological and political message, a seal of their Petrine magisterium. Francesco, in 2013, was a symbolic break: no one before Bergoglio had dared to inspire himself to the poor man of Assisi, the saint of the meeting with Islam, of peaceful disobedience, the renunciation of power and above all of love for the poor. A radical gesture. The choice of Cardinal Robert Prevost, on the other hand, has more the flavor of continuity, of a return to a line of symbolic succession: the thirteen leo popes. To understand what awaits us, we need to reread them those pontificates, especially the first and last. There is already drawing the profile of the next magisterium in the name of the announcement and mission.
It starts from Leone I, called Magno. A saint. We are in the fifth century, the West Empire collapses under the blows of the barbarian invasions. But it is the bishop of Rome to deal with Attila, the terrible and ferocious king of the Huns, defusing an announced horrendous barbarism. He stops him with the strength of non -violence and his charism cloaked in faith. Leone is the icon of the moral authority that supplies the emptiness of political power. Leone writes, preaches, builds the doctrinal bone of the Church. It is the pontiff of peace, in an era of barbarian invasions of death and destruction. When he dies, in 461, he leaves a theological legacy that will last centuries. He is the first to deserve the title of “Magno”, and it is no coincidence. And it is he who over 15 centuries will inspire the Cardinal Prevost, who from the loggia of San Pietro, after his election, will appoint the word peace 10 times.
Leo II, although lived only one year by Pope (682-683), confirms the ecumenical council that condemns the monothelite heresy, for which in Jesus there would have been only divine nature. A year is not enough to sculpt a work, but leaves its mark in the defense of orthodoxy which will probably be one of the Careturstics of the Pope’s Petrine Ministry with double American and Peruvian citizenship. Leo III, in 795, crowns Emperor Charlemagne. It is the birth of Christian Europe: Rome is no longer the imperial capital, but the symbolic heart of a new civilization; You can read the whole mission for a Europe to be tested, and to be respected for its past cloaked in faith and monasteries. Then there is Leone IV: we are in 847. The Saracens threaten the eternal city, and the Pope builds the famous Leonine walls. Geopolitics enters geography. The “Leonina city” is a spiritual and military fortress. After him, Leone V reigns for only 40 days. Depost, imprisoned, perhaps assassinated: the papacy has never been an oasis of peace. In this roundup of Papi Leone we take a step forward and arrive at 1513 after Christ, when Giovanni de ‘Medici, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent rises to the papal throne: it will be Leo X, protagonist of the splendid Renaissance era, patron of artists and writers. But also the one who authorizes the sale of indulgences, accelerating the fracture with Luther. His pontificate is magnificence and ruin: the papacy as a temporal power touches the peak, and begins to creak. His distant relative, Alessandro Ottaviano de ‘Medici, became Leo XI in 1605. He died after only 27 days. It is the era of the counter -reform, but its name remains a note on the foot.
Everything changes with Leo XIII. And here, the choice of Prevost finds its deepest reason. Born in 1810, elected Pope in 1878, after the long pontificate of Pius IX, Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci is an intellectual giant. In a century marked by ideologies and social question, he published in 1891 the Rerum novarumthe first social encyclical of the Church. Condemns Marxist socialism and predatory capitalism, proposing the “third way” of the Gospel. It defends private property, but only if anchored to the common good. It requires right wages, dignity for work, rights for workers’ families. He writes: “The worker is not a commodity”. One hundred and thirty years later, this sentence is still a prophetic cry. In a globalized world where multinationals disappear with an algorithm, where finance called politics on politics, Leo XIII remains more sadly current. It is the Pontiff who also saves the Augustinian order – to which Prevost belongs – from the nineteenth -century suppression. But it is not just a question of spiritual affiliation. The choice of the cardinal of the two Americas is a doctrinal line of dignity and justice for the last. As if the “Rerum Novarum” had found its global dimension, in the new millennium, from the “Desplazados” of Lima to the “Hillbilly” displaced from the Ohio Rust Belt.
Prevost comes from the Americas, from a continent torn by inequalities: the rich North, the exploited South. Bring the name of Leone today is a political act, almost revolutionary. It is a notice to the markets and the rulers: the next Pope will move in the furrow of Francesco, even if he has not dared to peerpetual the name of those who dared to speak to the masters of the world by interpreting the voice of the last. He will move in this furrow, but with a different name.
