Pope Leo XIV

Pope Leo XIV (born Robert Francis Prevost, 1955, Chicago) was elected on May 8, 2025, becoming the first American pope. He signaled his central concern immediately: he told the College of Cardinals days after his election that he chose the name Leo in reference to Leo XIII — whose 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum answered the first industrial revolution — because the Church now faces “another industrial revolution” in artificial intelligence, posing new challenges to human dignity, justice, and labor.

Magnifica Humanitas

His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, was signed May 15, 2026 — 135 years to the week after Rerum Novarum — and published May 25. The 42,000-word document is the most sweeping statement any global institution has issued on AI: it opposes autonomous weapons and transhumanism, warns of deepfakes, algorithmic bias, and chatbots offering “the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject,” and insists that data “is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off.” The National Catholic Reporter summarized it as a call to “disarm” AI.

The encyclical is careful to say technology is not “inherently evil” — its argument is that technology is never neutral, because it takes on the character of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. World leaders in Canada, Mexico, Colombia, and Spain cited it approvingly; much of Silicon Valley dismissed it. Either way, a church of 1.4 billion members now has a formal social doctrine on AI, and it reads as a warning.