Editing Open Sourcing the Virtues of a Perl Programmer (section)

=== Leo XIV, Leo XIII, St. Thomas, and Aristotle ===

Leo XIV himself places this technological moment in continuity with Leo XIII. In ''Magnifica Humanitas'', he explicitly recalls the ''res novae'' — the “new things” — that confronted Leo XIII during the industrial transformation addressed in ''Rerum Novarum'', and argues that the Church must likewise interpret the “new things” of the present technological age.<ref name="LeoXIV2026" /><ref name="LeoXIII1891" /> The analogy is especially apt because neither pontificate begins by asking whether a new technology or economic power is simply good or bad. The deeper question is how new forms of power affect human persons, relationships, work, responsibility, and the common good.

The line can be traced farther back without pretending that every document is merely a restatement of the one before it. Leo XIII's pontificate deliberately restored St. Thomas Aquinas to a central place in Catholic philosophical formation in ''Aeterni Patris''.<ref name="LeoXIII1879" /> Thomas, in turn, received and transformed much of Aristotle's moral philosophy. His account of prudence as reason rightly governing action openly draws on Aristotle's treatment of practical wisdom.<ref name="AquinasST" /><ref name="Aristotle1999" /> Aristotle's ethical inquiry itself is ordered toward ''eudaimonia'': the flourishing life that gives individual virtues their place within a larger account of human good.

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'''Aristotle → St. Thomas Aquinas → Leo XIII → Leo XIV'''
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Aristotle supplies a durable language of virtue, practical wisdom, ends, and flourishing. St. Thomas integrates that moral vocabulary into a broader account of human action and the good. Leo XIII brings a Thomistic intellectual orientation to a pontificate confronting the social consequences of industrial modernity. Leo XIV consciously returns to Leo XIII's ''res novae'' at another moment of technological transformation and again asks whether human powers are being ordered toward the flourishing of persons and communities. This is an intellectual inheritance rather than a claim of simple one-to-one textual dependence, but the continuity of the question is clear: ''what are our powers for?''