Leo XIII, the pope who championed trade unions, reigned until age 93
Elected in 1878 and still pope at his death in 1903, Leo XIII had one of the longest reigns in Catholic history. His 1891 letter Rerum novarum backed fair wages, safe workplaces and trade unions while defending private property, earning him the nickname Pope of the Workers.
Gioacchino Vincenzo Raffaele Luigi Pecci was born on 2 March 1810 in Carpineto Romano, near Rome, the sixth of seven children of a count who had served as a colonel under Napoleon. A lover of Latin who wrote his own Latin verse at eleven, he studied with the Jesuits in Viterbo and then at the Collegium Romanum after moving to Rome as his mother lay dying in 1824. He chose the secular clergy at 18, trained in diplomacy and law at the Academia dei Nobili, helped oversee hospitals during a cholera outbreak, and earned doctorates in theology and in civil and canon law in 1836.
His early career was as a papal administrator. Sent to Benevento, the smallest papal province with roughly 20,000 people, he tackled banditry and criminal networks tied to aristocrats, then reformed taxes to boost trade. In Perugia, a province of 200,000, he fought corruption, once personally weighing a bakery's loaves and giving underweight bread to the poor. Named nuncio to Belgium in 1843 at 33, he won over the liberal King Leopold I and pushed for a Belgian College in Rome, where a young future John Paul II would study in 1946.
As Archbishop of Perugia from 1846 to 1877 he founded shelters for homeless children and elderly women, soup kitchens and low-interest lending banks for the poor, and hired Thomist professors for his seminary. He became a cardinal in December 1853, giving the money for his celebrations to victims of earthquakes and floods.
As pope he wrote 86 encyclicals, including a record eleven on the rosary, which made him the Rosary Pope. He revived the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and in 1879 sponsored the Editio Leonina of his works. Rerum novarum opposed both atheistic communism and unrestrained capitalism, laying foundations for modern Catholic social teaching. He was the first pope since Stephen II in the 8th century to rule no Papal States, which had vanished by 1870. He died of pneumonia in July 1903, and his remains moved to the Lateran basilica in 1924.
Source: Pope Leo XIII
