Two Leos: The Popes, Technology, and the Battle for Humanity’s Future

By Robert J. Hutchinson

When Robert Francis Prevost stepped onto the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica on May 8, 2025, and announced that he would be called Leo XIV, Catholics around the world asked the same question: why Leo?

The answer reaches back more than a century, to a remarkable Italian nobleman named Vincenzo Pecci who became Pope Leo XIII and changed the Church’s relationship to the modern world forever. In Two Leos, veteran Catholic author Robert J. Hutchinson — author of When in Rome, Searching for Jesus and The Dawn of Christianity — offers the first dual biography of these two extraordinary popes, tracing their parallel lives across two centuries and two civilizational crises: the Industrial Revolution that shattered the old social order, and the artificial intelligence revolution that is reshaping ours. Along the way, Hutchinson tells the story of Catholic social teaching itself — what it is, where it came from, and why it may be exactly what the world needs now.

Two Popes, Two Revolutions

For two thousand years, the Roman popes have stood as a prophetic voice against the delusions and barbarisms of empires, proclaiming the simple truth that every human being is precious in the eyes of God and cannot be used as a pawn in whatever schemes kings, CEOs, or government bureaucrats may have in mind.

Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) grew up in a world of peasant agriculture and parish-centered communities—a pre-industrial economy whose logic shaped everything he later wrote. When the Industrial Revolution destroyed Europe’s agrarian economies and reduced millions to slavery in urban factories, Leo responded with Rerum Novarum (1891), the landmark encyclical that rejected both laissez-faire capitalism and revolutionary socialism, insisting that workers have natural rights to association, living wages, and property—and that the state has obligations to protect those rights.

Pope Leo XIV grew up in suburban Chicago as the sexual revolution reshaped American societies and dissolved stable immigrant Catholic communities. A missionary for 13 years during Peru’s bloody civil war against Marxist revolution, he witnessed the effects of a globalized economy in the faces of poor children.  His choice of name signaled a conscious resumption of Leo XIII’s moral crusade —this time to confront the globalized economy, artificial intelligence, and the rise of new reproductive technologies that make Brave New World look tame.

What This Book Does

Two Leos is a work of political philosophy in the form of a dual papal biography. It traces how two popes, separated by more than a century, confronted the same fundamental crisis: What happens when technological revolution makes human beings expendable? Leo XIII watched industrial capitalism reduce workers to interchangeable units in a factory system. Leo XIV is watching artificial intelligence do the same to knowledge workers, genetic engineering redefine what it means to be human, and a globalized economy subordinate entire nations to corporate profit margins. The book doesn’t prescribe a single political program.  Rather, it asks whether any system that treats persons as means rather than ends can be made just, and what it would take to build one that does.

What You’ll Find Inside

• How Leo XIII used thirty—two years of “exile” in Perugia to develop the intellectual framework for modern Catholic social teaching
• Robert Prevost’s formation in Peru during the Shining Path insurgency, and what it taught him about just war, violence, and institutional competence
• The Church’s long argument with liberalism—from the Enlightenment through Vatican II to today’s post—liberal moment
• Why Rerum Novarum’s rejection of both capitalism and socialism remains the most intellectually serious alternative to libertarian individualism and collectivism
• Leo XIV’s early statements on AI, migration, genetic engineering, and the “culture of death”—and whether papal humanism has the resources to be right about the second Industrial Revolution

About the Author

Robert J. Hutchinson has spent thirty years writing about the Catholic Church and the origins of Christianity. He is the author of When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City (1998), Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth (2015), and The Dawn of Christianity (2017). Hutchinson studied philosophy as an undergraduate, moved to Israel to learn Hebrew, and earned an MA in theology. He is currently pursuing doctoral studies in philosophy at a European university.

? Download the Introduction Chapter Free

Get early access to the full introduction and chapter-by-chapter outline—see what the book covers and why it matters now.

? Download Introduction PDF

? Book the author for podcast or media outlet

The post New Book on the Two Leos Coming November 2026 first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Solidarity can be defined as the virtue or habit of recognizing our duties to the common good and arranging our social and political institutions so that basic human needs can be met.

One obvious example of how the principle of solidarity affects community life is health care.

In their landmark 1993 statement on healthcare reform and Catholic Social Teaching, A Framework for Comprehensive Health Care Reform, the U.S. Catholic bishops insisted that the principle of solidarity in Catholic Social Teaching (CST) requires that quality healthcare be available to everyone regardless of ability to pay.

Basing their analysis on Jesus’ admonition to care for “the least of these (Matt 25:40),” the bishops insisted that “genuine health care reform must especially focus on the basic health needs of the poor…”  They even went so far as to say that the poor have a compelling claim to “first consideration” and access to “comprehensive benefits.”

These mandates do seem at least partially fulfilled by 2010 Obamacare system.

Yet others clearly are not.

Solidarity with our fellow humans also requires respect for life, the bishops said – and it was Obamacare’s provisions on abortion and birth control services that led the bishops to reluctantly refuse to endorse the system once it was finally passed.

Moreover, the mandate for serving the poor has to be balanced by other considerations of justice, the bishops said, including cost containment and controls and what they termed “equitable financing.”

“We have the best health care technology in the world,” the bishops observed, “but tens of millions have little or no access to it and the costs of the system are draining our nation, our economy, our families and our Church to the breaking point.”

Indeed.  In late January 2019, two weeks after the close of the Open Enrollment period for health care insurance, we received our dreaded annual notice from Anthem Blue Cross:  the monthly premiums for our family would increase 25% over the year before, from $1,445 per month to $1,800.

When the comically misnamed Affordable Care Act first went into effect in 2010, our premiums were $350 per month for a high-deductible policy ($5,000 per person) roughly equivalent to the Bronze Plan on most exchanges.

The new price of $1,800 per month represents a total increase of 414.2% — or about 22.7% per year over the past eight years.

This is a far cry from the $2,500 annual savings that President Obama promised.

Like thousands of others, my family is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place when it comes to health insurance:  we earn too much to qualify for Obamacare subsidies… yet the price of even the cheapest Obamacare plans are increasingly out of reach.

With five children and two in college, paying $1,800 per month means hard choices.

And we’re constantly told we’re actually lucky.

Were we to pay for one of the ADA-compliant policies on the exchanges, we’d be paying $2,500 per month in 2019 – or $30,000 per year.

That’s more than our mortgage.  And it’s a lot more than we pay in Social Security, State Income Taxes or even Federal Income Taxes.

Right now, health insurance is our single greatest expense outside of college tuition.

And to make matters worse, there is no escape:  in many blue states, such as California and Washington, the Democrat-controlled legislatures quickly outlawed the short-term and other co-called “catastrophe” plans that would allow families to access affordable coverage even temporarily.

This is a deliberate attempt to force everyone into a “one-size fits all” Obamacare system.

All this is further complicated by a healthcare delivery system built on outright greed:

The Democrats sold their healthcare plan to the insurance companies with the promise that it would mean billions in additional profits.

To pay for the uninsured poor, the Democrats promised a system that would force everyone to purchase the insurance companies’ products – with temporary cash infusions from the government until the insurance companies could raise premiums to a maximum level.

Since buying into the system was mandatory, the insurance companies had an artificial monopoly:  consumers could choose between two or three similar plans all equally expensive.

And the Democrats certainly delivered on their promises to the insurance companies:  Anthem’s Executive Chair, Former President and CEO Joseph Swedish, earned $18 million in 2017.

Long Beach, Calif.-based Molina Healthcare’s new CEO, Joseph Zubretsky, earned $19.7 million in total compensation the same year.

To be fair, Obamacare did result in extending healthcare coverage to roughly 20 million people who lacked coverage before – but at the cost of making healthcare insurance beyond the ability of many middle class families to pay.

Instead of funding coverage for the poor from general tax revenues, the Democrats created a new, regressive tax – a kind of second income tax — that specifically targets middle class families and allows the fraud, waste, overbilling and greed of the existing insurance system to remain in place.

Twenty-five years after the Catholic bishops outlined a statement of basic principles of healthcare reform based on Catholic Social Teaching, the cost of health care in the U.S. is still skyrocketing.

Worst of all, the burden of paying for health care increasingly falls disproportionately on middle class families who, increasingly, cannot afford it.

Many Americans now must deliberately reduce their work hours or incomes so they are eligible for Obamacare subsidies, making it difficult to save for retirement or send their children to college.

Even Americans who receive their health insurance through their employers often do so at the cost of stagnant or reduced wages and shortchanged retirement programs.

The lesson of the Obamacare disaster is that, if solidarity means anything, it means burdens must be shared equitably – not merely shifted from one group to another.

The post Skyrocketing Obamacare Premiums Forcing Many Middle Income Families to Make Difficult Choices first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

What’s a peaceful, freedom-loving, family-oriented, hard-working Catholic guy to do with the current state of U.S. politics? For decades, now, it’s been obvious that even a moderately faithful Catholic cannot feel at home in any of the major, or even the minor, U.S. political parties. We are given the choice between an increasingly militaristic, even bellicose Republican Party that goes out of its way to sneer at civil liberties and enthusiastically endorses torture, illegal surveillance of ordinary citizens and the death penalty… and the morally tone-deaf party of slavery (both literally and figuratively), the Democrats, who have never seen an authoritarian Big Government program they didn’t like and whose only economic policy prescription is to “Tax the Rich” (the “rich” being defined as anyone who holds a job) and whose embrace of “abortion rights” is so extreme that it even includes outright infanticide.

Not a very appealing choice. The Party of Death versus, well, the Party of More Death.

The truth is, Catholics are odd ducks in American politics. The ones who actually go to church and believe the central tenets of their Faith (as opposed to the “I was raised” Catholic variety who skew polling data) are, by and large, fairly conservative on social issues (abortion, marriage and embryo research), moderate on economic issues and occasionally downright liberal on environmental, peace and justice issues. (Most church-going Catholics, for example, accept Pope John Paul II’s teaching that the death penalty is illegitimate in most modern societies.) Part of this odd political schizophrenia stems directly from Catholic social teaching as enunciated in papal encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum (1891), Quadragesimo Anno (1931), Mater et Magistra (1961), Populorum Progressio (1967) and Solicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) and Centesimus Annus (1991). As the popes have explained for the past 200 years, the dominant principles underlying Christian teaching on both social and economic issues are what’s called the Principle of Subsidiarity and the Principle of Solidarity.

The Principle of Subsidiarity means that, for both practical and philosophical reasons, matters ought to be handled by “the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.” That means that Catholics believe in local, de-centralized, “small is better” forms of government. You don’t have the Federal government setting education policy, for example, when education is done on a local neighborhood level. In practical terms, the principle of subsidiarity favors regional solutions to problems over dictats from distant and unaccountable authority. On this score, Catholics would gravitate more towards a free market or Republican approach to economic matters. The Catholic political sensibility favors federalism, states’ rights, regionalism, non-empire building. Small is beautiful indeed.

But the principle of subsidiarity must also be balanced by the Principle of Solidarity or a commitment to the common good. As Pope John Paul II explained it in his encyclical Solicitudo Rei Socialis, “Solidarity… is a virtue directed par excellence to the common good, and is found in ‘a commitment to the good of one’s neighbor with the readiness, in the Gospel sense, to ‘ lose oneself’ for the sake of the other instead of exploiting him, and to ‘serve him’ instead of oppressing him for one’s own advantage (Mt 10:40-42, 20-25;Mk 10:42-45; Lk 22:25-27) ( Sollicitudo Rei Socialis ). Thus, while Catholics believe in the liberty-based ideals of a free market and de-centralized authority, these ideals are not absolute: They must be balanced with a “commitment to the good of one’s neighbor.” For that reason, most faithful Catholics do not object to, say, zoning regulations that prohibit strip clubs from opening near schools… or environmental protection laws that forbid dumping toxic waste directly in the ocean. The principle of solidarity is also why Catholics oppose abortion on principle: A woman’s freedom of choice ends precisely where another human life is involved.

For me personally, the only politician who comes close to living up to these ideals is the “unelectable” and “crazy” Dr. Ron Paul. Ron Paul is a libertarian on economic matters (more libertarian than Church teaching), opposed to the death penalty, opposed to America waging undeclared and unending wars overseas, opposed to the illegal and immoral use of torture, opposed to violations of civil liberties through the U.S. Patriot Act. Because he was a true physician and O.B. and delivered thousands of babies, Dr. Paul is also prolife, which, to me, shows a willingness to concede that his libertarian principles are not absolute. I thus voted for Dr. Paul in 2008 and will vote for him again in 2012. He is the only Republican candidate who even pretends to adhere to any fixed principles.

For a while, I was tempted by some of what the Green Parties say. I am, after all, prolife. I was raised in a vast forest. I’ve always liked the Greens and agree with a lot of the Global Greens Charter adopted in Canberra in 2001. The global Green Platform includes many very Catholic statements of principle in regards to nonviolence, social justice, participatory democracy, economic and ecological sustainability, de-centralized decision-making, human rights, and so on. Were it not for abortion, I would probably even sign up! The Greens oppose capital punishment and torture, as do I. They support regional farming and small business, as do I. Their champion for a long time was Ralph Nader, whom I have always liked even when I disagree with him on some economic questions and despite the fact that he is a lawyer.

Unfortunately, however, in the U.S. the Greens, like Amnesty International, have been taken over by extremist pro-abortion fanatics for whom the right to kill infants in the womb is “non-negotiable.” In Europe, most of the Green Parties insist that “questions implying life and death are sensitive ones indeed and let it be clear that the European Green Party has never advocated unrestricted abortion rights.” The European Greens, especially in Germany, have had painful experience with what happens when societies endorse medical killing…. and are thus much less enthusiastic when it comes to abortion and euthanasia than are liberals in the U.S. But for U.S. liberals, abortion trumps all else. How a party that claims to be “green” can celebrate the surgical dismemberment of an infant in the womb… or think that chemically poisoning such a child through saline solution or RU486 is somehow a “life-enhancing” act… is beyond me. Here is what the platform of the Green Party in the USA states on abortion:

Women’s right to control their bodies is non-negotiable. It is essential that the option of a safe, legal abortion remains available. The “morning-after” pill must be affordable and easily accessible without a prescription, together with a government-sponsored public relations campaign to educate women about this form of contraception. Clinics must be accessible & must offer advice on contraception; consultation about abortion and the performance of abortions. — Source: 2008 Green Party Platform from 2008 Chicago Convention Jul 13, 2008

Well, that crosses the Greens off of the list for Catholics, at least the Greens in the U.S.!

What about the Phillip Blond’s Red Tories? They are consciously drawing upon Distributist ideals. Distributism is the name given to the political aspirations of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Fr. Vincent McNabb, OP, in the early 20th century. Opposed to both Big Government liberals and Big Business conservatives, the Distributists favored small, locally owned farms and businesses and sought to put into practice the Corporal Works of Mercy. Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker movement were an example of early Distributist thought. Certainly, neo-Distributism has many attractions for Catholics… and much of what the Red Tories say appeal to us. Yet among their many attractions, numbers isn’t one of them – meaning, both Distributism and the Red Tories are more of a philosophical objection than a real-life movement.

If I was really pressed, however, I would have to say that the political movement that comes closest to authentic Catholic ideals and my own temperament would have to be The Idler movement founded by UK writer and general layabout Tom Hodgkinson. IN a very real way, Tom comes far closer to living out the ideals of Distributism, and thus of Catholic social teaching, than any of the more “serious” political parties we’ve been discussing. In a very real sense, The Idler movement is apolitical. Like G.K. Chesterton and the Distributists, Tom thinks that the most important things in life have nothing whatsoever to do with politics — things like raising children, dancing with your wife, river racing, drinking with friends — and that we should, by and large, ignore both politics and politicians. For example, Tom does not vote… and, the more I see of U.S. politics, the more I understand why he takes this stance. How can a person with principles stand with either the Party of Slavery (the Democrats) or with the Party of Torture (the Republicans)?

The post Can a Faithful Christian be a Democrat, Republican or Green? first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.