New AI Encyclical Is a Battle for Humanity’s Future
Leo XIV is pushing back against the Silicon Valley dogma that intelligence is computation and consciousness just code.
A few days into his pontificate last May, Pope Leo XIV got a business pitch.
Someone proposed building an AI deepfake version of him so website visitors could have virtual papal audiences.
“I said, ‘I’m not going to authorize that,’” Leo recalled. “If there’s anyone who shouldn’t be represented by an avatar, I would say the pope is high on the list.”
The first American pope has a way of cutting to the chase.
On May 25, Leo XIV releases Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), his first encyclical, on artificial intelligence and human dignity.
Pope Leo XIV signs his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te (“I Have Loved You”), in the library of the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican Oct. 4, 2025.
He signed it on May 15. That was the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, his namesake Leo XIII’s landmark 1891 social encyclical on the impact of industrialization on human communities.
At the Vatican press conference, Christopher Olah, co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, will sit alongside Catholic social teaching scholars to present the document. Theologians and tech founders, same table. Rome has seen stranger things, but not many.
The encyclical isn’t coming out of nowhere.
For a year, Leo has been saying in every conceivable forum what he thinks is at stake.
He told 16,000 teenagers in Indianapolis to use AI “in such a way that if it disappeared tomorrow, you would still know how to think.”
He warned the priests of Rome not to let chatbots write their homilies. “To give a true homily is to share faith,” the pope explained, and no algorithm can share faith.
He told legislators from 68 countries that AI “functions as a tool for the good of human beings, not to diminish them, not to replace them.”
In his January message for World Communications Day, Leo got even more specific.
AI systems, he wrote, “have increasingly taken control of the production of texts, music and videos,” putting “much of the human creative industry at risk of being dismantled and replaced with the label ‘Powered by AI,’ turning people into passive consumers of unthought thoughts and anonymous products without ownership or love.”
The masterpieces of human artistic genius, he added, are being reduced to “mere training grounds for machines.”
Strong words. The encyclical will presumably go further.
The philosophical tradition behind all of this has a name: Catholic personalism.
The Church has been refining it for centuries, from the scholastics through such 20th‑century thinkers as Emmanuel Mounier and John Paul II..
In the Catholic understanding, intelligence is not simply the ability, like that of an LLM, to make mathematical calculations. It also includes the ability to grieve... to sacrifice... and, as Leo put it, to stand “in authentic wonder before the beauty of God’s creation.”
Whether a papal encyclical can actually influence how AI gets built and deployed is a fair question.
Rerum Novarum didn’t stop the robber barons. But it gave generations of workers, legislators, and labor organizers a language and a framework they didn’t have before.
In the same way, Magnifica Humanitas is less about banning AI than about giving engineers, lawmakers, and bishops a vocabulary robust enough to say no when machines encroach on what only persons can do.
That’s what’s being attempted here: not tech regulation, but a philosophy of the person rigorous enough to push back against the mostly unexamined Silicon Valley dogma that intelligence is computation and consciousness just code.
We’ll find out May 25 whether the world is listening.
Robert J. Hutchinson is the author of When in Rome and Searching for Jesus. His forthcoming book, Two Leos: The Popes, Technology, and the Future of Humanity, examining the parallel pontificates of Leo XIII and Leo XIV, will be published by Angelico Press in November.