In his first official direction to the Roman Catholic Cardinals, Pope Leo XIV said on Saturday that he would continue his work by Pope Francis to direct the Church in a more missionary direction, with greater cooperation between the leaders of the churches and the proximity to them.
Leo said he had pledged to follow a course of modernization that the church began in the 1960s and mentioned an important document that Francis published in 2013.
“Francis with Aristotle and specifically put it,” Leo said, referring to the document, called Evangelii Gaudium.
The young Pope also explained the choice of his name. The previous Pope, named after Leo XIII, issued a document called “Rerum Novarum”, known in English as “rights and duties of capital and labor”, in the late 19th century, where he emphasized the right of the Church to submit allegations of social issues.
The document “examined the social question in the context of the first major industrial revolution,” Leo explained.
Now, the Pope added, another industrial revolution was held in the field of artificial intelligence. This, he said, will “raise new challenges to defend human dignity, justice and labor”.
The Church, he said, “offers everyone the Ministry of Finance of its social teaching in response.”
The reference to the Francis document was not the only approval given by the new Pope from his predecessor. Francis, Leo noted, was a “humble servant of God and his brothers”, who gave an “example of complete devotion to service and sober simplicity of life”.
The cardinals appeared to have noted the message about maintaining the direction set by Francis.
As he left the meeting where Leo spoke, Cardinal Baltazar Enrique Porras Cardozo in Venezuela said that the Pope “talked about Francis’s pontificate and then asked us some questions.” These questions were “mainly for the formation of priests and bishops,” the cardinal added.
On his way out of the meeting, Cardinal Sean Brady of Ireland said Leo was in the process “greeting everyone now, which is very nice”.
Jason Horovic and Elizabeth Dias References from the Vatican are contributed.
