AN U.S. pope told his own country’s tech companies what almost no government dares to pronounce.
He called for dismantling military algorithms, curbing companies that already weigh more than states and called the invisible work that sustains the industry slavery.
The giants of Silicon Valley chose silence.
Why is this encyclical so important?
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
There is an idea that runs through these pages from beginning to end: artificial intelligence is not a destiny that falls on us like a storm.
It is built by people, financed by investors and regulated, or no longer regulated, by governments. Someone decides every step. And everything that someone decides can be discussed, stopped or corrected.
That simple conviction is at the heart of Magnifica Humanitas, “magnificent humanity” in Latin, the first encyclical that a pope dedicates entirely to artificial intelligence.
It was presented by Leo XIV in May 2026, in the Vatican’s Synod Hall, and with that gesture he brought the Catholic Church into the hottest fight of the moment, a table that until then had been occupied by the owners of large technology companies, governments and a handful of specialists.
This was not written for Sunday’s homily.
An institution that brings together 1,400 million people planted a flag in a technical discussion and turned it into a moral question.
When the Vatican gives its opinion, its word carries a weight that no poll can measure. And the detail that makes it spicy is who signs: the first American to sit in Pedro’s chair points out his warnings against companies in his own land.
The name already gave away the plan
Behind Leo XIV is Robert Francis Prevost. Before the cassock he did numbers: he studied mathematics.
Then he went to Peru, stayed for more than two decades, became bishop of Chiclayo and processed the Peruvian ID. In the Roman corridors they called him “the Latin gringo”.
The name chosen by a pope functions as a declaration of intent, and this one was no exception.
The previous Leo, the XIII, published more than a century ago an encyclical that entered the history books: Rerum Novarum, “the new things”. He had to deal with the industrial revolution and he didn’t mince words.
He defended the workers, he hit capitalism that squeezed them, also barricade socialism, and demanded wages that were sufficient and the right to form unions. That charter shaped the labor laws of half the planet for a hundred years.
Prevost left clues as soon as he took office.
We are living through another industrial revolution, he said, this time with artificial intelligence at the wheel, and the Church could not look the other way. The parallel is not decorative. Leo XIII spoke to the factories that devoured workers; Leo XIV speaks to the data-devouring servers.
The thesis: no machine is innocent
The Pope does not condemn technology. He repeats that the technique is not an enemy of the person or an evil in itself. But it nails an idea that comes back again and again throughout the text: no technology is neutral. Every tool carries the interests, priorities and values of those who design, finance and use it. Whoever presents artificial intelligence as a simple pile of calculations without ideology inside, the pope maintains, is lying or deceiving himself.
On that basis he raises everything else. The dignity of each person.
The common good. The conviction that the planet’s resources belong to the whole of humanity and not to a few. Old principles that the Church has been repeating for generations, now applied to a world of neural networks and data centers.
The metaphor with which he opens the document sums up the dilemma. Humanity, the Pope writes, can build a new tower of Babel, that biblical symbol of pride that ends up dispersing peoples, or it can build a city where we all fit. Artificial intelligence is good for one thing or the other. It depends on who has their hands on the keyboard.
The songs that burn
The first thing that reveals Leo XIV is the concentration of power. A small group of private companies, almost all based in the United States, today handle more data and more computing capacity than most governments in the world. The pope calls for strong laws, independent oversight and politicians who don’t hand the field to the industry.
He worries about work. Artificial intelligence can push millions of people into low-paid tasks, watched over by algorithms, with no real future. And he recovers that rod of Leo XIII: an economy is judged by whether it pays fair wages.
The hardest passage comes with autonomous weapons. Leo XIV calls for disarming artificial intelligence. Handing over to a machine the decision to kill opens, he writes, a destructive spiral. It gives up on the old doctrine of just war when applied to systems that fire without a human pulling the trigger. That phrase made several capitals uncomfortable.
Then the truth appears. Fake videos, manipulated audios, lies manufactured on an industrial scale that poison public debate and eat away at democracy. The pope devotes harsh paragraphs to pornography generated by artificial intelligence, especially that which uses the faces of minors, and to applications that undress people without their knowledge.
And there is a blow that few expected. Leo XIV speaks of new slavery behind the screen. The workers who label data for miserable wages. The moderators who spend hours looking at the worst of the internet so that we don’t see it. The children who extract minerals from African mines to make chips. The pope asks forgiveness because the Church took too long to condemn slavery in other centuries, and promises not to stumble over the same stone twice.
The underlying paradox
The pope publicly thanked Anthropic, Christopher Olah’s company, for collaborating in the drafting. Whoever passes the text through Pangram, the detector that tracks automatic writing traces, receives an alert: a machine walked through these pages, and the pattern points to Claude, the model of that same company.
Pangram fails quite a bit when it tries to calculate what percentage came out of an algorithm, so that figure has to be taken with a grain of salt. Detect something else with more certainty: someone used artificial intelligence to put together the document. How much will always remain in doubt.
The paradox serves itself.
The first encyclical calling for limits on artificial intelligence was written, in part, with artificial intelligence. Far from sinking the argument, it confirms it: the tool does what its author asks of it. A machine can help draft a plea for human dignity or a system of mass surveillance. The difference is made by the person.
Why It Matters Beyond Faith
Others have already tried to set rules. The European Union approved its regulation on artificial intelligence. The Council of Europe signed an international treaty. Governments met at summits and came out with good intentions and few firm commitments. None of those efforts reach where the Vatican does: a network of parishes, schools and bishoprics that covers Latin America, Africa and much of Asia. A peasant from Chiclayo or a student from Kinshasa may never read a European law. What the pope said, on the other hand, will reach him.
A decade ago, Francis did something similar with the climate. His encyclical Laudato Si’ took global warming out of scientific reports and put it in the after-dinner conversations.
It used to seem like an expert affair; then it was hard to ignore. Leo XIV aims at the same goal with artificial intelligence: to tear it out of the language of engineers and quarterly balance sheets to sit it at the table where a society decides what to tolerate and what not.
The ceremony broke protocols.
The Pope did not read alone. Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, a Canadian in his early thirties who declares himself an atheist, took the stage. The picture said it all: the head of the Catholic Church and a programmer who does not believe in God, in front of the same microphone. Olah launched a phrase that went through the networks in hours. Every artificial intelligence laboratory, including his, works with incentives that sometimes clash with doing the right thing, and that is why the world needs moral voices that those incentives do not manage to bend. That the warning came from the one who builds these systems, and not from a bishop, gave it another weight.
The other Silicon Valley giants fell silent. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Meta did not drop a line.
The European Commission welcomed the text and recalled that Europe already has its legal framework. U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic, called it profound. His colleague Doug Burgum responded with sarcasm: he did not know, he said, that giving an opinion on technology was part of a pope’s task.
Beyond the reactions, the encyclical leaves only one question on the table, and it does not ask it to the machines. If artificial intelligence takes us to a dangerous place, the algorithms won’t be to blame. He will be one of those who could put limits on them and preferred not to do so.
References
Leo XIV. (2026). Magnifica Humanitas: Encyclical Letter on the Custody of the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. https://www.vatican.va
National Catholic Reporter. (May 25, 2026). Pope Leo and the co-founder of Anthropic call for an ethical alliance between Church and technology at the launch of “Magnifica Humanitas”. https://www.ncronline.org
Vatican News. (May 25, 2026). Pope Leo’s “Magnifica humanitas”: AI must serve humanity, not concentrate power. https://www.vaticannews.va
