Leo XIII (1810-1903), was elected pope in 1878. His reign was the third longest in papal history. Only Pius IX and John Paul II served longer. Leo wrote many encyclicals–that is, letters to the entire Roman Catholic Church. One of the most famous was Rerum Novarum (1891), which upheld the rights of labor.
Leo was open to new forms of government but was suspicious of democracy. In a letter to United States Catholics in 1895, he warned against seeing the American separation of church and state as an ideal for all nations. In 1899, he addressed another letter to the American church condemning Americanism, a movement that had many followers in France and Italy. It was an adaptation of such American concepts as religious liberty and the need to adjust the presentation of Catholic teachings to modern ideas and practices. Leo was born on March 2, 1810, in Carpineto, Italy, near Rome. His given and family name was Gioacchino Vincenzo Pecci. He died on July 20, 1903.
