Pope Leo XIV has published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence. The headlines that followed were predictable. “Pope warns of AI dangers.” “Pope calls for AI to be disarmed.” “Vatican fires broadside against tech industry.”
If you read only the headlines, you would conclude that the Holy Father has condemned the technology outright. Several of my readers and clients have written to me asking exactly this. So let me try to help.
The short answer is no. The Pope is not condemning AI. He is doing something far more useful, and far more important. He is doing what his namesake did in 1891.
The Rerum Novarum pattern
Pope Leo XIV signed his encyclical on 15 May 2026, exactly 135 years to the day after Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum, the foundational text of Catholic social teaching written in response to the industrial revolution. The choice of date is not decorative. It tells you how to read the document.
Leo XIII did not condemn industrialisation. He saw, correctly, that a vast new technology was transforming human life and that the gains were being captured by a small number of actors while ordinary workers were being reduced to inputs. His response was not to oppose the machines. His response was to insist that the human person be placed at the centre of the transformation. Property rights, fair wages, the dignity of work, the right to associate. Structural answers to a structural problem.
History broadly vindicated him. Industrialisation eventually produced the modern middle class and lifted more people out of material poverty than any system before it. But that outcome was not automatic. It required the kind of moral and structural pushback that Rerum Novarum helped to crystallise.
Leo XIV is doing the same job for the AI era. He is not telling us to fear the technology. He is telling us to ask who controls it, who profits from it, and who is left out.
What I actually see in practice
In my own team we use AI extensively. Every consultant, every back-office function, every research task. It has not once occurred to me that I now need to get rid of someone. The effect has been the opposite. With AI, everyone in the team can go much further. Work that used to take a week takes a day. Research that required three specialists now needs one specialist and good prompts.
This is the part of the conversation that often gets lost. AI in the right hands does not replace people. It compounds them. That matches what the encyclical actually calls for, namely a technology placed at the service of human work rather than over it.
But let us be honest
Radical change creates anxiety. It always has. Some people will not be able to keep up. Some will not want to. Adapting is hard work, and pretending otherwise is dishonest. We cannot rest on our laurels, and some do not like that.
Consider an example that has nothing to do with AI. I take Mounjaro. It works. It also bankrupted large parts of the legacy diet industry, including Weight Watchers, which filed for Chapter 11 after losing millions of subscribers to a single weekly injection. Do I feel bad about that? No. A better solution arrived. The world rearranged itself around it. People who built careers on the old model had to adjust, and many of them did. That is how progress functions. It is not cruel. It is real. And it is certainly not unique to AI.
Whole categories of work will compress or disappear. New categories will emerge that none of us can yet name. The Pope knows this. He is not asking us to freeze the world in place.
Where the encyclical is genuinely cautionary
This is where Magnifica Humanitas deserves close attention, and where I want my readers to focus.
The encyclical devotes a substantial section to freedom. The Vatican’s own summary puts it bluntly: freedom is “menaced by digital dependence that collects massive amounts of data.” The Pope warns about algorithms used to decide access to credit, employment, healthcare, and essential services on the basis of “unjust and prejudiced data.” He warns that “data, surveillance or hidden systems shape people’s choices without them fully knowing it.” He warns that control of the technology must not remain in the hands “of a few.”
This is not theology. This is a description of where things are heading.
The genuine risk identified by the encyclical is not that AI will take your job. The risk is that AI will be married to the modern state and used as the most sophisticated apparatus of control in human history. Programmable money. Digital identity that follows you across every transaction. Predictive systems that decide whether you board a plane, open a bank account, or are flagged as a risk to public discourse. The kind of surveillance that would make the Redeverbot my great-grandfather Nikolaus Ehlen received under the Nazi regime look almost gentle by comparison. He was silenced because he could be physically reached. The next generation will be silenced because a model flagged a sentence.
The Pope did not name specific governments. He did not have to. Anyone paying attention to the direction of EU digital ID, central bank digital currencies, content moderation regimes, and the integration of AI into social administration knows exactly what he is talking about.
So, again, is the Pope condemning AI?
No. He is asking us to make sure the gains of this revolution reach human beings, not just the institutions that will deploy it on us. He is saying that the technology is not the problem. The concentration of power around it is. The surveillance apparatus being built with it is. The temptation to delegate to machines the decisions that belong to persons is.
I am genuinely hopeful about what AI will do for productivity, medicine, education, and ordinary daily life. I use it every day, and so should you. But hope about the tools is not the same as trust in the systems that will wield them. Those are two different questions, and Magnifica Humanitas makes the second one impossible to ignore.
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