Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical on May 25, a wide-ranging reflection on artificial intelligence that calls the technology a “change of epoch” (§4) and warns against allowing the human person to be treated as “a project to be optimized” (§112).
Titled Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) and signed May 15, the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s landmark labor encyclical Rerum Novarum, the document is the most extensive treatment artificial intelligence has yet received from the papal Magisterium. In a striking signal of the Church’s intent to engage the technology directly, the Holy Father presented the text alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of the AI firm Anthropic who leads its research on AI interpretability. The encyclical arrives alongside a new Interdicasterial Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which Leo established days earlier to coordinate the Church’s response, overseen by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
Despite its subject, the encyclical is as much a document about the human person as about artificial intelligence. Leo warns that a culture of relentless efficiency tempts the person to regard himself “as a project to be optimized rather than as a creature called to relationship and to communion” (§112), and insists that dignity “does not depend on the capacities he possesses… but is a gift that precedes and exceeds him, given by God” (§50). He makes the crucial point: “For an algorithm, error is something that must be corrected; for a person, it can be the beginning of a profound change” (§128).
Drawing on the late Pope Francis, Leo commends what Francis called a “situated anthropocentrism”—a vision that recognizes the human being not as an isolated master of the world but “as a creature inserted into a weave of relationships with the other living beings and with the totality of creation” (§237). Fidelity to the truth, he writes, “demands integrating the possibilities that technology offers into a path of wisdom” (§237).
The encyclical declines to issue a final verdict for or against AI. “The first choice,” Leo writes, “is not between a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ to technology, but between building Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem” (§9)—the prideful tower of Genesis against the city rebuilt, in the Book of Nehemiah, through the shared labor of a whole people. Technology, he writes, “can heal, connect, educate, and care for our common home; but it can also divide, discard, and generate new injustices” (§9).
Leo raises pointed concerns about the concentration of technological power, noting that “the principal engines of development” today are “private actors, often transnational,” wielding resources “greater than those of many governments” (§5). He argues AI is not “morally neutral” (§104) and calls for “independent audits, transparency in algorithms, equitable access to data, tools of appeal” (§71). He reserves some of his most forceful language for the “new slaveries” of the digital economy—the poorly paid “silent labor of millions” who label data and moderate content, and the “adolescents and children” who mine the materials behind AI hardware (§173).
Likewise, he denounces autonomous weapons and states “There exists no algorithm that can make war morally acceptable” (§198).
The document also rejects what Leo calls the “Manichean visions typical of violent narratives, which divide the world between good and bad” (§222). Against the reflex to construct identity over against an enemy, he urges the patient work of peace, of “disarming words,” dialogue, and diplomacy, and warns against a “false realism” that treats war as inevitable (§205).
The encyclical closes not with a set of guidelines or policy prescriptions, but with two figures. The first is Nehemiah, who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem “piece by piece” through the shared labor of a whole people—Leo’s model for the patient, collaborative engagement he asks of Catholics. Against the “culture of power,” Leo sets the “civilization of love” (§186), a social order in which justice and charity become the organizing principles of economic, political, and cultural life. The second figure is Mary, whose greatness lies not in what she produced by her own devices, but in what (Who) she received. In a reflection on her Magnificat which concludes the document, Leo finds the icon of a humanity that finds its fullness not by seizing a technological means of becoming “more than human” but by welcoming “a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms” (§128). He leaves the faithful with the question Pope St. John Paul II first posed of technological progress. Does it “make human life on earth, in all its aspects, ‘more human’?” (§129). “Let us not be afraid,” Leo writes, “to soil our hands in the work of our time” (§16).
Image: Pope Leo signs Apostolic Exhortation, Dilexi Te, Sourced from OSV News/Vatican Media/CPP
Andrew Likoudis is a Catholic scholar specializing in ecclesiology, ecumenism, and contemporary debates surrounding Church authority and reform. He is the founder and president of the Likoudis Legacy Foundation, editor-in-chief of The Kydones Review, and digital editor at Where Peter Is. He is the editor of Faith in Crisis: Critical Dialogues in Catholic Traditionalism, Church Authority, and Reform (En Route Books, 2025), which features a foreword by Rocco Buttiglione and contributions from Cardinal Robert Sarah and over thirty Catholic scholars. His writing has appeared in the National Catholic Register, Catholic Review, Patheos, and Philosophy Now. He holds an M.A. in Catholic Studies from Franciscan University of Steubenville and a B.S. in Communication from Towson University. He is an associate member of the Society for Catholic Liturgy. Learn more at andrewlikoudis.com and subscribe to his Substack, Tradition and Renewal.
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