The Catholic Church in Tonga has not yet announced the Tongan name of the new Pope, Leo XIV.
However, a prominent church scholar and author of the history of the church in the kingdom, Dr Felise Tāvō, has suggested the Catholic name Leone for Leo, during a Letiō ‘Apifo’ou live stream show yesterday.
Since the beginning, it has been common practice for the Church in Tonga to use Tongan names for foreign names.
The last Pope, Francis, was known by most non-Catholic Tongans as Felenisisi, derived from his English name Francis, while Catholics referred to him as Falakiko, from the Latin Franciscus.
The new Pope Leo XIV was Robert Francis Prevost, 69, who is now the 267th occupant of the throne of St Peter.
He is the first American to fill the role of pope, although he is considered as much a cardinal from Latin America because of the many years he spent as a missionary in Peru, the BBC says.
Born in Chicago in 1955 to parents of Spanish and Franco-Italian descent, Prevost served as an altar boy and was ordained in 1982.
Although he moved to Peru three years later, he returned regularly to the US to serve as a pastor and a priest in his home city.
He has Peruvian nationality and is fondly remembered as a figure who worked with marginalised communities and helped build bridges.
Leone is a Catholic Tongan name
The name Leo, which means lion in Latin and leon in Greek, has a Tongan Catholic variant, Leone.
For Tongan Catholics, the translation of biblical and papal names follows Latin roots, while Protestant churches derive their translations from English.
This linguistic difference has historically led to name variations between Tonga denominations. One example is the Apostle Peter, referred to as Pita in Protestant churches such as the Free Wesleyan Church of Tonga but Petelō in the Catholic tradition, stemming from the Latin Petrus.
The history of the papal name Leo
The last Pope Leo was Leo XIII, born in French-occupied Rome in 1810. He served as pope from 1878 until his death in 1903, making his 25-year papacy the fourth longest in the church’s history, according to a CNN report.
Leo XIII is remembered as a pope of Catholic social teaching. He wrote a famous open letter to all Catholics in 1891, called “Rerum Novarum” (“Of Revolutionary Change”). The pamphlet reflected on the destruction wrought by the Industrial Revolution on the lives of workers.
In a press briefing Thursday after the conclave, Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni said the choice of name “is a clear reference to the modern social doctrine of the Church, which began with Rerum Novarum.”
Bruni said the name Leo was a deliberate reference to “men, women, their work, and workers in an age of artificial intelligence,” seeming to link the pace of technological change of the current era to that of the nineteenth century.
The first Pope Leo, who served in the fifth century, is known as “Leo the Great,” and is remembered for persuading Attila the Hun to halt his invasion and spare the Roman Empire from destruction.
Their meeting was rendered in a 1514 painting by Raphael. The Renaissance work is now displayed in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, which the 133 voting cardinals, including Cardinal Robert Prevost, now Leo XIV, passed through as they proceeded into the Sistine Chapel on Wednesday for the start of the conclave.
In the painting, an unarmed Pope Leo – watched over by St. Peter and St. Paul – calmly confronts Attila and his army. Their meeting is celebrated by Catholics for showing that peaceful agreements can be reached without violence.
