Address of Pope Leo XIV to the College of Cardinals
Pope Leo XIV10 May 2025
The address to the cardinals, two days after his election, in which Pope Leo XIV commits himself to the path of the Second Vatican Council as Pope Francis set it out, and explains why he took the name Leo.
Leo XIV spoke to the cardinals on 10 May 2025. He asks them to renew their commitment to the path the church has followed since the Second Vatican Council, lists points from Pope Francis’s Evangelii gaudium that he wishes to stress, and then gives his chief reason for the name: Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum on the social question in the first industrial revolution, and the challenge of a new one. It is his own explanation and is cited for that in Leo XIV, the First Pope from the United States.
Cited in
- 8 May 2025, firm date