“Pope of the Workers”
The newly-chosen pope has taken the name Pope Leo XIV, in reference to the previous Leo: Pope Leo XIII who led the church from 1878 to 1903 during a time of great wealth inequality in the U.S. and industrialization around the world.
During his papacy, Pope Leo XIII defended the rights of workers to a living wage and stood up for the poor. He was sometimes referred to as the “pope of the workers,” and tried to steer the church away from being an elite institution.
“The hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself,” he wrote in a famous encyclical defending workers’ rights.
News and Views
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Today’s Win
SAG-AFTRA wins tentative agreement at Nickelodeon.
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