Thinking Out LoudIf there’s something strange (the rise of AI) in your neighbourhood (the social and moral fabric of our lives), who you gonna call?
The Pope, of course.
(Also for ghosts, if the increase in requests for exorcisms in some Western countries is any indication. But let’s focus on AI.)
Perhaps it reflects the strangeness of 2026 that this month’s hotly anticipated new release isn’t an album drop or a movie premiere but a papal encyclical: a consideration of the moral and spiritual implications of artificial intelligence under the working title Magnifica Humanitas, “Magnificent Humanity”.
Pope Leo XIV reportedly signed the document on 15 May – exactly 135 years after his namesake, Leo XIII, released his watershed encyclical Rerum Novarum, “Of New Things”, which forcefully made the case for human dignity and justice in the context of the Industrial Revolution.
It’s less incongruous than it might seem that society would take its cues on AI from the head of the Catholic Church. The Vatican has been hosting the Minerva Dialogues, AI ethics conferences for Silicon Valley technologists, for a decade. Catholic thinkers were invited to contribute to Anthropic’s development of Claude’s “constitution” or “soul doc”. And TIME included Leo on its 2025 list of the world’s most influential people in AI.
Leo’s pronouncements on AI so far show why. He warns against allowing chatbots to become “hidden architects of our emotional states”, turning us into “passive consumers of unthought thoughts” instead of what we are “called” to be: “co-workers in the work of creation”. “Faces and voices are sacred,” he insists.
If you suspect Silicon Valley can’t be trusted to steward our humanity in the age of the “new thing” that is AI, then this fully-orbed picture of who we are and what we’re for may be exactly the counterweight we need.
This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.