Pope Leo XIII

Image of Pope Leo XIII with white text above and below on a brown background

Pope Leo XIII was the head of the Catholic Church from 1878 until his death in 1903. He was born in Italy on March 2, 1810 as Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci. During his papacy, he re-founded the Vatican Observatory, opened the Vatican Secret Archives to researchers, and established a hospice inside the Vatican during the cholera pandemic in the 1890s. Pope Leo XIII was the first Pope to be filmed with a motion picture camera and he was also the first Pope to be heard on a sound recording, which can be found on a CD of Alessandro Moreschi singing.