Why is the Pope Writing About AI?

On Monday, May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV will release his first encyclical. Its subject is artificial intelligence. The title is Magnifica Humanitas: On the Protection of Human Dignity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

For people who follow technology policy closely, this raises an obvious question. Why is the Pope, of all people, the one writing this? AI ethics is a crowded field. Universities run institutes on it. Governments have published strategies. The major labs employ entire safety teams. Why would the Catholic Church have anything distinctive to say?

The short answer is that the Church has been thinking about this for longer than most of the field has existed, and the framework it brings is unusual in a way that turns out to matter.

The longer answer is the rest of this page.

The Catholic Church engages with technology through a specific lens

Catholic social teaching is a body of doctrine that began with Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, written in response to the industrial revolution. The argument was that the new factory economy was producing real material progress and real human suffering at the same time, and that the Church had a duty to think about both. Leo XIII rejected both unregulated capitalism and revolutionary socialism. He insisted that workers had dignity, that families needed protection, that property rights existed but were not absolute, and that the common good was something governments and employers had obligations toward.

That framework, refined across more than a century by successive popes, treats every major technological transformation as a moral question first. Not a question about what the technology can do, but a question about what it does to human beings and the communities they live in.

This lens produces unusual outputs. When the Church looks at AI, it does not first ask whether the model is accurate or whether the company is profitable or whether the regulation is workable. It asks whether the use of this tool, at this scale, makes human beings more themselves or less themselves. Whether it serves the vulnerable or extracts from them. Whether it builds up the bonds between people or replaces those bonds with simulations.

You can disagree with the conclusions the Church draws. The framework itself is coherent and has been refined for a long time.

The papal engagement with AI did not start with Leo XIV

It is tempting to read the May 25 encyclical as a new departure. It is not. Pope Francis spent the last years of his pontificate building the Vatican's engagement with artificial intelligence, and Pope Leo XIV is continuing work that was already underway.

The key milestones, briefly:

February 2020. The Pontifical Academy for Life convened Microsoft, IBM, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Italian government at the Vatican to sign the Rome Call for AI Ethics. This was, as far as I am aware, the first formal commitment by major AI companies to a faith-based ethical framework. The document set out six principles: transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality, reliability, security and privacy. Brad Smith signed for Microsoft. John Kelly signed for IBM.

January 2024. Pope Francis devoted his annual World Day of Peace message to AI. The title was Artificial Intelligence and Peace. The argument was that AI development without ethical constraints would deepen existing inequalities and threaten human autonomy, and that an international treaty was needed.

June 2024. Italy invited Pope Francis to address the G7 summit at Borgo Egnazia, on a special outreach session dedicated to AI. He became the first pope in history to address a G7. He warned that AI risked turning human relations into algorithms and called for an outright ban on lethal autonomous weapons.

January 2025. The Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, jointly with the Dicastery for Culture and Education, released Antiqua et Nova. This is a 117-paragraph document on AI ethics, signed personally by Pope Francis. It is the most substantive Catholic engagement with AI to date and the immediate predecessor to the encyclical releasing this week.

May 2025. Pope Francis dies. Cardinal Robert Prevost is elected and takes the name Leo XIV.

Throughout 2025-2026. Pope Leo XIV makes AI a central theme of his early pontificate. In speeches and his 2026 World Communications Day message, he develops the theme that AI ethics is fundamentally an anthropological question, that human faces and voices are sacred, and that AI literacy is a Christian responsibility.

The encyclical does not arrive out of nowhere. It is the culmination of six years of building.

The choice of name signals the Pope's intent

Popes choose their names. The choice is deliberate and is read by Catholics as a statement of programmatic intent.

When Cardinal Prevost chose Leo XIV, he was reaching back to Leo XIII, who wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891 at the height of the industrial revolution. Leo XIII's argument was that the Church could not be a bystander while a new technology transformed the lives of workers, families, and communities at unprecedented scale.

The parallel is not subtle. Pope Leo XIV is signaling that he sees AI as the comparable technological transformation of our moment, and that he intends to occupy the same kind of position Leo XIII occupied for industrial labor. The encyclical was signed on May 15, 2026, which is the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum. The dating is intentional.

The Church's framework is anthropological, not technological

Most AI ethics work, whether it comes from universities, governments, or industry safety teams, starts from the technology and asks what guardrails should be placed on it. What outputs should be filtered. What use cases should be restricted. What harms should be measured.

The Catholic framework reverses the question. It starts from the human person and asks what kind of technology is consistent with human flourishing. The technology is downstream of the anthropology.

This produces conclusions that look different from secular AI ethics. The Church is, for instance, far more worried about AI companionship and AI-generated relationships than mainstream policy discussion has been. Pope Leo XIV's 2026 World Communications Day message went after this directly: synthetic voices and faces are not neutral. They encroach on what the Catholic tradition treats as sacred, which is the actual encounter between two human persons.

Conversely, the Church has been less worried about some of the questions that dominate secular AI ethics. Algorithmic bias matters in Catholic teaching, but it matters as one expression of a deeper problem about whether technology serves the vulnerable. Existential risk from superintelligent AI does not feature heavily in Catholic engagement, because the tradition does not approach intelligence as the defining property of personhood in the first place.

You do not have to agree with this framework to find it interesting. It is a coherent alternative to the standard secular framings, and it is the framework that produced the document releasing on Monday.

What the encyclical is likely to do

The full text of Magnifica Humanitas will not be public until May 25 at 11:30 AM Rome time. The Vatican has indicated that Pope Leo XIV will be present in person at the Synod Hall release, which is unusual and signals that the document is being positioned as a major intervention.

Based on Pope Leo XIV's prior speeches, on the trajectory from the Rome Call through Antiqua et Nova, and on the choice of title, the encyclical is expected to do roughly four things.

First, establish that AI ethics is fundamentally an anthropological question. The title Magnifica Humanitas means something close to "the magnificence of humanity." The framing argument will likely be that the question is not what AI can do but what humans are.

Second, defend the dignity of human faces and voices against synthetic substitutes. This has been the consistent theme of Pope Leo XIV's public statements on AI, going back to the deepfakes that targeted him personally in 2025.

Third, call for AI governance that protects the vulnerable. The Catholic preferential option for the poor is doctrinally non-negotiable. Any Catholic document on AI will land somewhere on the question of who benefits and who pays.

Fourth, address AI in work, in education, in family life, and in the relationship between human creativity and machine output. Antiqua et Nova covered all of these, and the encyclical is likely to extend rather than abandon that ground.

Church & Code will publish a section-by-section summary at release. The summary page is here and will update as soon as the text is out.